The Speech & Hearing Center offers testing and treatment services for auditory processing disorder (APD). APD isn’t technically hearing loss or a learning disorder. It is a condition where the brain doesn’t fully coordinate with the ears, causing difficulties in recognizing and interpreting sounds, especially speech. It can occur in anyone but is most common in children and older adults.
Symptoms
Auditory processing disorder can affect the way one speaks as well as their ability to read, write, and spell. This is why it is often seen with attention, language and learning issues such as ADHD or dyslexia.
People with auditory processing disorder have a hard time hearing small sound differences in words. They may drop the ends of words or mix up similar sounds. For example, if someone says, “Please raise your hand,” they may hear something like “Please haze your plan.”
Symptoms of auditory processing disorder (APD) can be subtle. If you have APD, you might:
- Take longer to reply to someone who is talking to you.
- Often need others to repeat themselves.
- Not understand sarcasm or jokes.
- Have difficulty following conversations or remembering spoken instructions.
Diagnosis and Treatment
It is important to understand that there is not one cure-all method of treating APD. The key is accurate and careful diagnosis by an audiologist and individualized therapy by a speech-language pathologist.
Our audiologist will do a series of advanced listening tests in which the patient will listen to different sounds and respond when they hear them. After diagnosis from our audiologist, our speech pathologist will then create an individualized therapy plan. This therapy treatment focuses on changing the learning or communication environment to improve access to auditorily presented information.