What is an Auditory Processing Disorder?
Auditory processing is essentially the way the brain interacts with the ears. When a person has an auditory processing disorder (APD), his ears work fine, but the connection between ears and brain doesn’t work smoothly or quickly enough. As a result, the person with APD will have difficulty following directions, understanding and participating in conversations, ignoring background noise, or remembering what she has heard. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, children who have APD may have trouble learning vocabulary and grammar as well as having difficulty “hearing” differences among similar sounds in words: “cat” may sound like “cap,” for instance. This significantly complicates their ability to learn to read and spell since they aren’t able to clearly understand the sound-to-letter relationship.
