As parental or classroom admonitions for better behavior go, "Calm down and try to listen"has to be among the more popular ones. But what if sometimes, there was a child who was constitutionally ill-equipped just to listen to that gentle direction? There is a new entity in the world of learning disorders. It is called Auditory Processing Disorder; and even if it's been around forever, it has only just begun to gain some well-deserved attention from the public and the medical community. Auditory processing disorder or APD isn't that well understood yet, but this syndrome is certainly seen to disrupt the way the brain can listen to, and understand sounds. This isn't a rare problem by any means either - diagnosed or otherwise, one out of five children is affected.
Rosie O'Donnel the talk show host and actress recently began to stump for this ill-understood syndrome on her show: her son suffers from APD. Children with APD start out doing poorly in school with trouble reading and with words. Often, they have a tough time understanding the teacher's directions and a lot of trouble staying put or paying attention. Doctors often takes these symptoms and mistakenly infer the presence of other learning disorders that are known well to give children trouble in school - like ADHD.
So how does APD actually work - what is it do? Let's say that you know a child with APD; it's winter and you ask the child if he wants the heat turned up or down. The child says 'heat up!' So you go and turn the heat up; but now the child protests. Apparently by 'heat up' the child meant the heat was too high already and you were to do what it took to solve the problem. Giving vague replies isn't the only problem; they have a great deal of trouble even hearing words properly - to them rhyming words sound all the same for instance. If you said, "She took the car too far" the child would hear "she took the car too car". He would know that this made no sense, but wouldn't be able to see what you meant either. The brain just turns sounds around and makes them difficult to understand. Children with APD therefore, learn few words, and can't really understand how words go together, because much of what they hear is all jumbled up.
And as for paying attention in class, it isn't that their minds wander like the mind of a child with ADHD does. It's just that there auditory system is unable to perceive and tell apart foreground and background sounds. If there are sounds in a classroom of the other children shuffling and murmuring a little bit, and the teacher is speaking in a clear singular voice, the APD mind hears them all the same way, at the same level; and the teacher's voice is drowned out by all the low-level background chatter. They do listen hard, but it becomes impossible when there is so much happening at the same sound level. Learning disorders like these can be very hard for others to understand and adjust to.
Speech therapists can help. The child can receive training to work hard to tell rhyming words apart. At school, the child can wear sound-isolating headphones connected to a microphone the teacher speaks into. This way all the background chatter is cut out by the electronics, and the child only hears the teacher's voice. No one really understands how learning disorders like these work. There is a good deal of science directed at these new discoveries; but the one piece of good news here is that there is nothing here that affects the child's intelligence. It's just the way the intelligence is able to communicate with the world that is troubled.