It is often difficult to understand what it may be like for people with auditory processing disorders (APD) to deal with information they receive through their auditory systems. Regardless of how you approach auditory processing, regardless of what is your beliefs and understanding of APD, there are certain basic common factors on which most specialists in the field of auditory processing agree. These factors often relate to processing problems such as deficits related to understanding speech in the presence of competing auditory signals (also referred to as auditory figure-ground, speech-in-noise, competing listening conditions), auditory decoding problems, auditory temporal (related to time) processing deficits, auditory memory difficulties, and auditory integration problems. Therefore, this simulation will focus on these areas.
The purpose of this simulation is to compare processing of altered visual stimuli (words, letters, commas and spaces in the typing) as comparisons to processing of auditory messages. The letters represent the sounds of speech also called phonemes. In some cases, the letters that make the sounds of speech will be used rather than the letters used to spell the words. For example, in the word "thing," the letter "i," the vowel, actually makes the sound of /ee/. Thus, to spell the word thing to represent the phonemes, for this simulation, the word would be spelled using slashes "/" and the letters would represent the sounds such as /theeng/. Although students of phonetics will realize this is not correct phonetic transcription, it will be used to help the reader understand that the word is to represent the sounds and not the letters.
In order to better understand what is each component of auditory processing discussed in this simulation, the specific factors, such as integration, will be briefly described at the start of the section related to that factor. Therefore, read each section entirely in order to understand what is meant by that factor as it relates to auditory processing.
In general, auditory processing is viewed as what a person does when his/her ear receives an auditory message and the central nervous system extracts the meaningful information from that message, eventually, comprehending or putting meaning to the message. Auditory processing, then, can be viewed as the various steps or "processes" involved once an auditory message leaves the inner ear and travels from the inner ear (known as the cochlea) through the central nervous system to the brain and then is acted upon by various components of the brain. As such, auditory processing is a very complex thing involving many different processes. What this simulation provides is visual information (letters, words, spaces) that must be processed by the reader via the visual processing system in order for the reader to gain some understanding and insight into the complexity of processing in general.
Copyright © December 2000 (Lucker and Wood)
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