Hear In Texas
What Is Auditory Processing Disorder (APD)?
Struggling to Make Sense of What You’re Hearing?
Let’s pose a hypothetical: if you’re in a busy restaurant or loud space with lots of background noise and the person you’re talking to asks you a question, do you hear it?
Individuals with APD sometimes struggle to understand a sentence on the first listen, as their brains accidentally scramble the words and sounds that it’s trying to process, so instead of “What time is dinner?” one might hear “What chime is thinner?”
It’s frustrating to mishear something so banal, and it can cause a lot of confusion for both the speaker and listener.
How APD Is Diagnosed and Assessed
We start your APD assessment with a discussion about you; your age, auditory ability, family history, and speech concerns may come up as we talk about your potential APD diagnosis before moving into your comprehensive hearing assessment.
A comprehensive hearing test is often the first step to diagnosing APD so that we can rule out whether hearing loss is the cause of your hearing processing difficulties.
An APD assessment will include various tests that will seek to understand:
- Your comprehension of speech in background noise
- Your capacity to fill in gaps in speech with logical words
- Ability to understand speech that happens simultaneously in a space
- Capacity to distinguish between similar speech sounds (like “cow” and “how”)
- Ability to identify the direction of a sound and where it’s coming from in a room
We’ll then discuss your results and the next steps to treat your APD. Language therapies that aim to boost your communication skills and comprehension improvement strategies could be the key to helping you treat it.
Book a Hearing Evaluation
Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) is often mistaken for hearing loss due to their similar symptoms. That’s why it’s crucial to begin addressing any hearing concerns—whether for you or your child—with a thorough hearing evaluation by a doctor of audiology at Hear In Texas.
To get started, just submit the form for yourself or your child, and one of our team members will reach out to assist you in scheduling an evaluation.
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