Perception is one’s ability to see, hear or become aware of something through the senses. It is the way we regard, understand and interpret information.
Auditory relates to the sense of hearing, but auditory processing/perception involves hearing, discriminating, assigning significance to and interpreting spoken words phrases, clauses, sentences and discourse.
Deficits in auditory processing underlie reading, writing and spelling difficulties and will affect all language based learning and general classroom performance e.g. following instructions or interpreting spoken language meaningfully and retaining information presented auditorilly.
Difficulty interpreting questions as they increase in length and complexity or inappropriate or incorrect answers suggest auditory processing problems.
Poor auditory vigilance, which is essentially the ability for a listener to remain attentive to auditory stimulation over a period, also suggests weaknesses. Written language difficulties include poor grapheme-phoneme (letter-sound) correspondences, omissions of words or poor sentence construction, as the child has forgotten to write the intended message.
Auditory processing involves memory skills. This is the ability to take information presented orally, to process the information, store it in one’s mind and then recall what one has heard. It involves the skills of attending, focusing, listening, processing, storing and recalling information and is vital for academic success.
Working memory requires the simultaneous storage and processing of information and has been identified as the translator between sensory input and long-term memory. Children with poor working memory typically make poorer academic progress.
Auditory discrimination is the ability to recognize differences in phonemes (the smallest unit of sounds in a language), including the ability to identify words and sounds that are similar and those that are different. Poor discrimination may result in spelling errors, misinterpretation of spoken information, poor rhyming skills and a need for constant clarification.
Auditory figure-ground assesses the child’s ability to understand speech in the presence of noise. This is vital as a child must be able to tune into a teacher’s voice in a busy classroom and ignore extraneous noise.
Auditory closure is the ability to use intrinsic and extrinsic redundancy to fill in missing or distorted portions of the auditory signal and recognize the whole message. This involves taking small pieces of auditory information and constructing a whole.
Auditory comprehension explores the child’s ability to reason, comprehend and conceptualize verbal information. Children with poor verbal memory often recall irrelevant details and miss significant information that is present.
Auditory reasoning skills reflect higher–order linguistic processing and are related to understanding jokes, riddles, inferences, logical conclusions and abstractions.
The most common cause of difficulties acquiring early word reading skills are weakness in the ability to process the phonological features of language which results in auditory analysis(segmentation) and synthesis(blending) difficulties. Weaknesses in the phonological area of language development are commonly measured by non-reading tasks assessing phonemic awareness.
The ability to identify, think about and manipulate the individual sounds in words enables the identification of children at risk for reading failure even before reading begins, since phonemic awareness has been shown to be directly related to the growth of early reading skills.
If a child is unable to perceive contrasts in phonemes and cannot conceptualize the identity of phonemes in syllables and words, they depend on rote memory when learning to read and spell. This restricts progress in reading and spelling and does not permit the precise comparison between spoken and written units of words.
To avoid a breakdown in auditory processing the following strategies can be used by parents and teachers:
· Children should be seated away from distractions.
· The light should be on the speaker’s face.
· Manners- one person talks at a time and other’s listen.
· The room is quiet before giving an instruction.
· Speak clearly, standing in one place, facing the child.
· Explain new vocabulary and encourage questions for clarification.
· Give concrete examples.
· Break instructions down into parts.
The child can be encouraged to use the following strategies:
· Keep eye contact with the speaker.
· Use good listening behavior. Quiet body and closed mouth.
· Ask for clarification if confused.
· Re-auditorize- repeat the information quietly to yourself after direction or information was presented orally.
Hearing is a passive involuntary process… but listening is an active, conscious mental process. So, remember, there is so much you can learn when you just listen!
Comments