Auditory Processing evaluations are provided for children (ages 8 years and older) and adult patients.  Auditory processing skills are automatic skills that underlie our perception of all sounds and are not specific to speech and language.  An auditory processing disorder is the inability or impaired ability to "process" information when hearing and intelligence are normal.

If your child is having difficulty learning to read, difficulty with spelling or difficulty following directions, he or she may have an auditory processing disorder.  Children with auditory processing disorders have normal hearing, but are unable to or have difficulty "processing" auditory information.  They are easily distracted and are often mis-diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).  Often they have low self-esteem or poor self-esteem and may have behavior problems.

A comprehensive auditory processing evaluation may help answer questions about your child's learning difficulties and help professionals direct treatment to appropriate areas of weaknesses.

Be sure the audiologist is experienced with APD test administration and interpretation. Don't be afraid to ask!

The mechanisms used in auditory processing are specifically dedicated to acoustic signals. Some important auditory skill areas include:

*Auditory attention - the ability to maintain purposeful focus to sound over extended periods of time

*Auditory performance with competing signals - the ability to focus on sound in the presence of competing auditory signals such as speech or noise

*Auditory and phoneme discrimination - the ability to tell whether two or more sounds are the same or different

*Auditory short-term memory - the ability to retain sounds in auditory memory for completion of a task

*Auditory sequential memory - the ability to remember sounds and words in sequential order

*Auditory pattern recognition - the ability to recognize patterns of duration, pitch, loudness and silent interval

*Auditory temporal processing - the ability to delete, discriminate, recognize and synthesize acoustic cues across time

*Auditory temporal resolution - the ability to detect the silent intervals between sounds

*Auditory temporal ordering - the ability to recognize the sequence of sounds presented

For more information about Auditory Processing Disorder or to schedule an appointment, please call 904-491-1515 or e-mail ears2u2@bellsouth.net.