What does APD look like?

Behavior at home:

• When given multi-part instructions, only does first part, then gets distracted or “forgets.”

• Family comments include: “Sometimes I think there is a hearing loss”; “hears what s/he wants to hear”; “acts like s/he doesn’t hear me sometimes”; “I know s/he has heard me, but s/he just sits there looking at me like s/he didn’t understand.”

• Parent reports: “the school thinks there is an attention problem, but s/he can play video games for hours, so I don’t see the lack of attention so much at home.”

• Has friends, but often complains that his/her feelings are hurt by playmates.

• Often doesn’t get humor (jokes) or sarcasm.

• Often asks for repetition or clarification.

• May not be able to tell where a sound is coming from or who is talking in noisy situations.

• Prone to temper tantrums or arguments when in a noisy situation.

• Poor at understanding people who have a heavy accent or whose speech is not clear.
  

Behavior at school:

• Experiencing academic problems. 

• Characterized by teacher as acting “spacey”, “dreamy”, “on another planet” or “lights on, but no one home” during class. 

• Difficulty learning to read or do calculations. 

• Rarely completes seatwork during school hours, even if time deadline is extended. 

• Easily distracted by antics of children in near proximity. 

• Teacher wonders if a hearing loss is present. 

• Poor at carrying out multi-step instructions.

• May do first step, but then cannot say what other parts are. 

• Has difficulty auditorially discriminating minimal-pairs (like “bed” and “said”). 

• Works better in quiet room (such as detention) than in regular classroom. 

• Does better in classes not dependent on oral language. 

• Needs more clarification of an oral assignment than other children. 

• Hardest classes rest on reading for content.

Note One: Only children seven years of age or older can be diagnosed with an Auditory Processing disorder. There is minimal testing for children five and six years of age. There are no tests of Auditory Processing for children under the age of five. APD may be suspected before that time, but to diagnose APD we have to compare the child's test responses to those of other children the same age. We only have solid comparisons ("norms") for children over seven years of age. 

Note Two: APD is a diagnosis that must be confirmed by an audiologist. Other professionals may suspect that there is an APD, but audiologists are the professionals that actually make the diagnosis.

Note Three: While APD testing may be done in the presence of some minimal hearing loss, usually a regular hearing test (audiogram) confirming that the outer, middle and inner ear function is normal is required for testing of APD to proceed.