What is an Auditory Processing Disorder or a Central Auditory Processing Disorder?
It is the inability to discriminate speech sounds causing weakness in auditory memory, vocabulary and/or phonics; the child’s hearing and intelligence are normal. The root problem is the inability to hear very small pieces of sound, sounds as small as 10 milliseconds (ms) in duration. Children/adults who have an Auditory Processing Disorder need a much larger piece of sound, maybe as large as 100 to 300 ms long. This is not a hearing problem; it is a processing problem. The phoneme, or speech sound, /b/ only lasts about 40 to 50 ms in duration. Vowels are much longer they are hundreds of ms long. I recommend Auditory Processing Therapy, using the Fast ForWord program, to remediate this problem for the child who fits the criteria.
