Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), also commonly referred to as Central Auditory Processing
Disorder (CAPD), is the inability to attend to, discriminate among or between, recognize, or
understand auditory information. APD is a sensory processing deficit that commonly impacts
listening, spoken language, comprehension, and learning. APD is associated with some sort of
dysfunction within the central auditory nervous system.
Characteristics of APD
Two to three percent of the population of children are believed to have Auditory Processing
Deficit with twice as many boys as girls being affected. Most children with APD have normal
intelligence and normal hearing sensitivity, however they appear hearing impaired.
Children with APD exhibit several of these symptoms:
- • Difficulty learning to read
• Poor reading and spelling skills
• Difficulties with phonics and speech sound discrimination
• Hear words incorrectly
• Difficulty telling sounds apart
• Saying “Huh or What”, “ I didn’t hear you”, or “I didn’t understand what you meant"
• Problems following directions, especially when complex
• Distracted by background noise
• Poor organization of verbal material
• Respond inconsistently or inappropriately to auditory information
• Difficulty attending to oral messages
• Oral and written expression problems
• Remembering what is heard
• Unable to learn songs or nursery thymes and poor music and singing skills
• Unable to concentrate, or stay on task, and are easily distracted
• Delay in responding when participating in oral communication
• Often have a history of ear infections or were born prematurely
• Listening for extended periods
• Unable to locate sounds
The ASHA (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association) defined Auditory Processing
Disorder (APD) in 1996 as a disorder with problems in one of the following six areas:
- 1. Sound localization and lateralization (knowing where a sound source is located)
2. Auditory discrimination (usually with reference to speech, but the ability to tell that
one sound is different from another)
3. Auditory pattern recognition (musical rhythms are one example of an auditory pattern)
4. Temporal aspects of audition (auditory processing relies on making fine
discriminations of timing changes in auditory input, especially differences in timing
between the way input comes through one ear as opposed to the other)
5. Auditory performance decrements with competing acoustic signals (listening in noise)
6. Auditory performance decrements with degraded acoustic signals (listening to sounds
that are muffled, missing information or for some reason not clear.)
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