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| Auditory Processing Disorders in Children Post-Institutionalization |
| Jay R. Lucker, Ed.D., CCC-A/SLP, FAAA |
| Posted by gwdadmin |
2001-06-15 |
Index
»
» Jay R. Lucker, Ed.D...
» page 2
Auditory Processing Disorders in Children Post-Institutionalization
Among the many concerns families have regarding the children they have adopted is whether communicating with the children is successful. Additionally, since communication serves a basis for developing academic skills, reading, and socialization, parents are especially concerned how well their children take in the verbal messages they receive and accurately and efficiently use this information. We can refer to the taking in and using of verbal information as auditory processing, and problems in these processes as Auditory Processing Disorders or APD.
For many children who have spent part or most of their early lives in orphanages in Eastern Europe, Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union, auditory processing may be disordered, undeveloped, or inappropriately developed. These children may be having communication difficulties, social problems, learning deficits, language disorders all because they lack development of normal auditory processing skills. Yet, with appropriate assessment, proper management and intervention when necessary, these children can improve how they process and deal with auditory-verbal information.
Auditory processing may be thought of as the internal processes a person uses to make sense out of verbal messages. Auditory processing has been described by Jack Katz as "What we do with what we hear." (Katz, Stecker, and Henderson, 1992). Additionally, Frank Musiek described auditory processing as "How the ear talks to the brain." (Chermak and Musiek, 1997). For a long time the term Central Auditory Processing Disorder or CAPD was applied in this area. However, in view of recent conceptualization regarding what is involved in auditory processing, the term Auditory Processing Disorder or APD is currently being used.
One way to view auditory processing is to see it as a series of steps beginning after a person hears or "receives" an auditory signal at the ear and proceeds through the ear to the auditory nerve where the information passes to through the central nervous system to the brain. As such, the entire ear, auditory nerve, and central nervous system are involved in processing verbal messages. Additionally, the efficient and accurate processing of verbal information sets the basis for our processing written text (reading and writing) as these may be considered auditory overlaid areas. That is, problems in auditory processing can have profound, negative effects on the normal development of reading and writing skills. This has led many in the field of dyslexia (or reading disorders) to view reading problems as primary auditory-language deficits.
The ultimate goal of auditory processing is to extract the important relevant information from the on-going stream of auditory messages one receives. In this process, we must take in what we have heard, extract information, store the information in working memory, make decisions about what bits of information we should save and what we can discard, put the bits of information together to form unified wholes, convert these bits into mental images and modify these mental symbols as new information is processed, and establish a plan for acting on the information comprehended whether merely to think and reflect on it or do something specific. Last, we take our actions, modifying what we do based on new information we receive and process. All of this is done in a matter of seconds while the stream of on-going auditory information rapidly flows past our ears requiring us to utilize many processes.
When we consider the complexity of this task, we need to consider that effective and efficient processing involves auditory systems, language knowledge, application of linguistic rules, attention factors, memory storage and later recall, decision making about the information we have received, and internal organization and planning. Considering all of these processes, we are tapping into auditory systems, language systems, cognitive systems and others. These others involve our emotional state at the time we are processing information, what experiences and familiarity we have with the information and topics of the messages presented, how well these experiences are stored and can be recalled, and how flexible we are in our decision making and problem solving when problems occur. Thus, auditory processing is not just an auditory phenomenon when viewed as outlined above.
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