Auditory Processing Disorder
Auditory processing describes what happens when the brain recognizes and interprets sounds. Humans hear when energy that we recognize as sound travels through the ear and is changed into electrical information that can be interpreted by the brain. For individuals with auditory processing disorder, something is adversely affecting the processing or interpretation of this information.
Children with auditory processing disorder (APD) often do not recognize subtle differences between sounds in words, even though the sounds themselves are loud and clear. For example:
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“Tell me how a chair and a couch are alike”
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may sound to a child with APD like
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“Tell me how a hair and a cow are alike.”
These kinds of problems are more likely to occur when the child with APD is in a noisy environment or is listening to complex information.
Fast ForWord can be an effective intervention for children with APD because it goes right to the cause of the problem, strengthening the gray matter in the area of the brain responsible for processing auditory information. In Fast ForWord, children are first exposed to sounds that are modified to enhance the minute acoustic differences between similar speech sounds. As children demonstrate proficiency and build new neural pathways, the program automatically reduces the level of modification, until eventually students are challenged to process normal speech sounds.
A recent study of public school children with APD in Singapore showed improvement in phonemic decoding and sight word reading abilities after training with Fast ForWord.
