What is the difference between auditory processing disorder and dyslexia

Most tests were administered across the table from the child, in regular classrooms, with the acoustic material delivered by a cassette recorder or by the clinician, at a conversational level. While these methods indicated a number of children had auditory processing difficulties, it was apparent that more stringent, controlled procedures, such as those typically used by audiologists, might yield better results.

Today, there is an increasing demand on the audiologist to provide useful clinical batteries for diagnosing auditory processing disorders APDs in children using standard audiologic test conditions. Interestingly, children are rarely referred to the audiologist based on auditory processing issues in isolation. It is likely that most children with APDs have comorbid conditions and therefore, the audiologist needs to ideally provide a targeted diagnostic battery that will ultimately distinguish auditory processing difficulties from other disorders.

Today, audiologists struggle to deal with these issues, while few of our diagnostic tools provide the sensitivity and specificity required to accurately diagnose a specific auditory processing deficit. A good example is children with dyslexia.

Many parents and professionals are confused about dyslexia and often express frustration because symptoms which characterize dyslexia appear to be indistinguishable from auditory processing disorders.

Some try to distinguish auditory processing problems and dyslexia based on the commonly held notion that dyslexia is primarily characterized by the visual reversal of letters during reading. Despite many efforts to more accurately define dyslexia, there are still a number of conflicting opinions and multiple sources of misinformation that make it difficult for parents and teachers to fully understand the nature of dyslexia.

Dyslexia is defined by the International Dyslexia Association as a 'language-based disability in which a person has trouble understanding words, sentences or paragraphs; both oral and written language are affected. Both of these definitions describe children with disabilities in the processing and acquisition of language, despite normal intelligence, normal hearing, normal vision, no known neurological impairments or deficits, and appropriate educational opportunities.

Neither definition addresses the etiology of the disability. However, a pioneer in reading disabilities Orton, suggested that perceptual impairments either in the auditory or visual domain, or both, were at the root of developmental reading disorders.

Orton recognized that the impairment was not related to absolute acuity in visual or auditory domain, but rather in the processing of information through the visual or auditory system. This is consistent with the profile of the dyslexic child with normal hearing, who has limited abilities regarding processing auditory information when the nature of the acoustic stimuli is more complex than a pure tone.

While much is known about normal processing of visual and auditory information, new advances in technology have helped us understand that our knowledge is inadequate. In the auditory domain, we have a general base of information regarding the processing of simple types of stimuli such as pure tones and clicks. This has helped us understand peripheral mechanisms and to some extent, central mechanisms involved in auditory processing, especially within the lower brainstem.

Nonetheless, information regarding how the brain processes complex acoustic stimuli and speech, is not yet sufficiently understood for the audiologist to diagnose a specific auditory perceptual deficit when auditory processing breaks down in the brainstem and other central locations.

The deficit could occur at many points along the ascending auditory system or it could be the result of failure of auditory information to integrate with information arriving through other sensory modalities.

Arousal, attention, cognition and other factors interact with auditory input and those factors must ideally be 'filtered out', to allow the auditory component of the deficit to be isolated and differentiated from other non-auditory deficits.

A number of audiologic tests demonstrated sensitivity to central auditory nervous system disorders. Most were developed in medical settings where they were used to demonstrate functional deficits in patients with known lesions within the auditory system. Phonological awareness: The most distinguishing feature of dyslexia is poor phonological awareness, which manifests in an inability to identify and blend together individual phonemes in words.

This discriminating skill is based on speed, not accuracy. Reading fluency: Reading fluency is the combination of the score of the accuracy of reading and the rate speed of which one can read.

Reading comprehension : Reading comprehension is the understanding of the printed word. Spelling: Spelling ability provides insight into other types of knowledge necessary for written communication. Poor spelling may reveal weaknesses in one or more of the following: Linguistic knowledge, Orthographic knowledge, Semantic knowledge, Morphological knowledge.

For example, a student who spells as actually has superb auditory and phonological skills. This student is hearing all four phones in the spoken word but has failed to be taught that those four phones are represented by three phonemes.

For more information you can read this article. Writing: Deficiencies such as spelling errors, syntactic and semantic errors, morphological errors, omissions of words or word endings, and general incongruities may be present.

In school, children with dyslexia may have difficulty with spelling, reading, and understanding information presented in print in the classroom. Have trouble paying attention to and remembering information presented orally Difficulty manipulating language both verbally and in print Need more time to process information Difficulty with spelling Difficulty distinguishing between verbally presented sounds or words.

They may hear clamp instead of camp. Difficulty with reading comprehension Difficulty focusing when background noise is present. Difficulty with fluency Have difficulty with reading, comprehension, spelling, and vocabulary.

There were also many comments about the ambiguity and lack of consensus about C APD. Now when someone asks you what is the difference between dyslexia and auditory processing you should be comfortable informing them that dyslexia is difficulty processing and manipulating language and auditory processing is difficulty processing sound. The differences have huge implications for how we help a child with either processing difficulty and the differences should not be taken lightly.

A child with dyslexia should not be involved in interventions for auditory processing and a child with auditory processing difficulties should not be involved in interventions for dyslexia, unless of course, that child has both. Now what about the difference between visual processing and dyslexia? People with dyslexia find that they are better at understanding spoken language than the language they read. This is because - even when writing a language, in some cases - letters are reversed or omitted due to a difficulty in processing the necessity for the sound.

Children with auditory processing disorder often have difficulty locating where sounds were coming from and figuring out what someone was trying to say. Because of this, children with auditory processing disorder are sensitive to noise and have trouble working with background noises. Because of this, children with auditory processing disorder are better at understanding what they read than what they hear.

These children are not deaf, and the functions within their ears work completely normal, but the way in which sounds are processed in the auditory cortex is sometimes incorrect and leads to confusion and trouble understanding what they are told. Think about the way in which we read to ourselves. When we read to ourselves, we are never actually hearing because no sound is made, but our brains can still in a way hear and interpret the sounds made by the word. This seemingly meta-process is what leads to much of the confusion between auditory processing disorder and dyslexia.

People with auditory processing disorder do not have trouble reading to themselves because they are, in fact, not actually hearing anything.