Difference between ADD and Auditory learning problem?

The problem is that these areas overlap quite a bit and it is hard to tease them apart. In the case with my daughter and myself we both have CAPD and ADD co-morbidity which means that we have the auditory processing problem and the focus/attention issue together.

Has she been diagnosed by an audiologist for her auditory learning disability? What you can do is to make sure that you are lokoing at her when you are talking with her. Also train her to give you eye contact and look at you when you are speaking to her. Also do lots of reflective listening to verify that she understood what you were trying to tell her. You may want to look into some assistive technology to help her with listening in a classroom or when there is background noise. Any other problems feel free to e-mail me..

My daughter has both ADD & APD, etc. She takes reading tests outside the classroom. She also takes Concerta which dramatically improved her abilities in every area (she was just ADD not ADHD, so it was overlooked for some time) SHe says, “Mom, the medicine helps my reading b/c it makes all the noise in the room go away”.

It is entirely possible that the APD issues have always been present. It is also possible to be ADD along with and depression of any sort would overwhelm all of these and make them sooooo much more deblilitating- sadness just takes up so much brain space. Poor child. Poor you too Mom. It just hurts to have your child in pain.

Relative to symptoms and presentation there is not a great deal of difference between ADD and APD. Accommodating them in learning situations is not all that different either. The difference is more apparent in how the kiddo responds to various treatment options. Why do they think APD rather than ADD?
Robin

You have hit upon the problem with diagnosing sooo many kids with ADD. We know that there are kids that suffer from childhood depression but I have yet to run into one. If you look at the ‘test’ for ADD, it is very subjective and the symptoms could be for a child who is frustrated due to a reading deficiency or depression. I truly think that a lot of kids are misdiagnosed. I know that my daughter would have been diagnosed as ADHD but her problem was that she was very frustrated because she couldn’t read. The last statistic that I have seen is that of those kids that are labeled ADD, 85% can’t read at grade level. I am sorry, no amount of medicine is going to teach a child how to read, which I think is the root of the problem. Auditory processing problems have their root in reading, not in ADD. Once the child is taught to read, auditory processing is generally not a problem. Is reading an issue for her?

A number of kids diagnosed as ADD, have a visualization problem. If a child can’t visualize, they can’t learn very well. This deficiency results in poor comprehension and problems following directions. It could be conceived as an auditory processing problem and focusing problem. For example, if you tell a child to take her test paper to the back of the room, put it on top of the rest of the papers that are on the shelf, and bring all of them to her, the student may start out going to the back of the room and then goes back to his seat, with the paper. He wasn’t able to visualize what he was supposed to do, so he couldn’t.

If you would, could you post her latest scores of her standarized testing?

Your description of the child who goes to the back of the room and then wonders what to do is *exactly* my daughter. I gave up and started giving her one direction at a time most of the time; occasionally tried to stretch to two but it’s still a hassle for her. She has learned herself to tell people firmly “one thing at a time!”. Luckily I taught her how to read and she is a top-notch reader. I also worked hard on her English and sent her to French school at age four so she became bilingual early and developed a love of language in all its forms; she is actually linguistically gifted, speaks several languages and is double-majoring in linguistics. But she still has to deal with one direction at a time. So is it possible to be gifted in language and reading and CAPD at the same time?

That is my son too. He can’t follow multistep directions. This is best demonstrated when I ask him to get dressed, brush his teeth, comb his hair, etc. Only the first thing I said gets done. He has his most severe deficits in the visual perception realm. I appreciate Shay helping me understand that although multistep directions are a verbal command presumably related to auditory skills (also his strength) it is really more a task related visual skills.

Thanks Shay.

They are neurological in nature. Auditory Processing problems do not cause reading problems all the time. I have a severe auditory processing problem especially in background noise, however I am an excellent reader and gifted. I also have ADD and I have had both of these disorders for my whole life.

What you refer to me sounds more orthographic in nature, associating the sounds with the symbols for reading. My daugther and I can tell you all the symbols in english and the sounds they are associated with, but what we can’t always tell you is what the words are that we are processing auditorially especially in background noise because we can’t process the signals/sounds out of the background noise in the words we are hearing..

What I wanted to clarify is that it takes a TON of ATTENTION to process things in classrooms. I have taught college/highschool classes and I panic when everyone is speaking at once. I have to tell all the students when I get into a classroom that I have this problem and usually they are very understanding. What is most ironic is that I learn auditorially as does my daughter but when we have had testing on our hearing and auditory processing the issues show up in background noise. I have a really hard time with understanding lyrics in music and it has gotten worse. What I try to do is to get the lyrics to the music and listen to it over and over again so that I can train my auditory memory. It takes a lot of work but it works for me. We get tired and we lose focus and that is when the ADD-Inattentive creative mind takes over because we are too tired focusing and we check out to more interesting fare in our minds..

Both my daughter and I are very visual, we remember things we see but in no way does that mean that we aren’t ADD. We are definitely ADD, we are easily bored, we can’t sit still, we want to constantly be doing something or moving our body. We can visualize a room when we are redecorating it and tell you what the finished product will look like because we are such good visualizers. We can remember many things that are told to us and we can visualize them and what to do, but what happens is we get DISTRACTED along the way. For instance my son who is ADD took a message on a piece of paper about my internship, yesterday and I just found it today…He wrote it down and promptly forgot to tell me because he got distracted and was doing other things. ADDer’s often forget to do things because their minds are going 24/7. In essence they are focused on too many things and have a lack of organizational skills and have trouble focusing on the important things.

Yes, auditory processing problems can cause reading issues but reading issues are not the root of auditory processing problems. Likewise ADD is not the root of auditory processing issues but it can be co-morbid with CAPD and ADD can also appear when the person with CAPD is exhausted from processing auditory information.. As I said before they are extremely difficult to tease apart and that is where a team approach of a psychologist, psychiatrist, speech and langauge pathologist, teacher, parent, pediatrician can help figure out what will help the child.

ADD and CAPD are both neurological in nature and to state that medication won’t help a child to focus so they may learn to read is not an appropriate statement. If it hadn’t been for medication my daughter wouldn’t have learned what it was like to focus so that she could learn to read and make sense of all the things she did know. Appropriate medication opened up the world to my daughter and other people that I have known and worked with as an educational therapist.

Shay wrote:
>
>. Auditory
> processing problems have their root in reading, not in ADD.
> Once the child is taught to read, auditory processing is
> generally not a problem. >
>I’m going to disagree with this statement. My son was misdiagnosed with auditory processing problems. I suspected the diagnosis was inaccurate so I took him to a university level tester for hours of testing. An example of one of the tests. The child is put in a sound proof booth with headphones. He listens to someone speaking and has to repeat what is being said. Then background noise is sent into the tape, the kind you might hear in a crowded room with lots of people talking. First the speakers voice remains promenent but slowly the background noise gets more and more intense until the child can no longer understand what the voice is saying. They also send in a different voice saying different things simultaneously into each ear and see what the child can recall. Kids with auditory processing problems can get blown away real fast with these kinds of test. It is a life long disability and has nothing to do with reading, although a child with this kind of problem is likely to have difficulty learning to read, especially in a normal classroom environment. There are many kinds of auditory processing problems beyond those mentioned above which will effect learning in different ways. I would also like to comment on the ADD issue that has come up in some of the posts. Imagine you were forced to put on somone elses glasses. Someone with a real bad eye problem. Then imagine you were forced to do school work with those glasses on, hour after hour. You’d get frustrated right? Antsy? Have difficulty concentrating as long as the other kids? Probably. Maybe some kids have ADD too, but I’m betting too many kids with some other type of problem causing them to be frustrated, are misdiagnosed as ADD.

Gee, Patti, you sound a LOT like me and quite a bit like my daughter! I too panic in the noisy classroom, and she hates noisy environments and gets unfocused and confused. Oddly enough my daughter is musically gifted and can hear several strands of music working together, something I can do only after dozens of listenings. However I’m the one who can design an entire renovation in my head and match paint colours from memory, and she claims not to visualize at all (retinal damage in youth and several years of very poor vision before she partially recovered may also be partly related to this.) She is a wiggler and squirmer and I used to be. Are you folks also active sleepers? She had to have fuzzy sleep suits and no blankets until age six or seven because she moved too much. Also a mattress on the floor until age four; too much risk of head injury. We’re also both good students, but the tradition in our family is to teach our own kids reading (and the relatives who didn’t do that had problems.) We’ve never used medication, although if it had been so much in style as it is now it might have been suggested.

I stand corrected but I think that we are talking about two different things. I am talking about most of the kids out there that are misdiagnosed ADD and have auditory processing disorders on their psyc exam and what the big problem turns out to be is that they have a lack of phonemic awareness. This also is considered as an auditory processing disorder, possibly could be seen as auditory discrimination, they can’t discriminate the sounds in words. The symptoms for a reading disability, ADD and even childhood depression can be all the same. We need better methods of screening for these problems. I am sure that if my daughter was in school now, she would have been diagnosed as ADD with H, and her behavior was due to frustration not being able to read. I am not saying that ADD doesn’t exist, but not in the percentage that we see. I didn’t have one student that was on medicine last year do well cognitively, most of them, in fact are repeating the grade.

I think the point is that many people see reading as a visual skill when the research done by Rosner, Simon, Lindamood, McGuinnes and many others point to it being related to an auditory skill. Phonemic awareness is auditory, and good phonemic awareness is the basis for reading.

I knew that when I started corresponding with you a long time ago. Great minds think alike…I also had two eye surgeries and years of vision therapy so I have had the whole gamut, ADD, vision processing and auditory processing issues. That is probably why I can figure out what people are going through I have probably been in their shoes at one time or another…Now it is hotflashes… I don’t think Men have those however…LOL

My daugter is a very active sleeper, she is all over the bed. Me I move around somewhat but no very much. What I have discovered is that B-Complex vitamins have helped me with attention, energy and you may want to try them…

I have the great joy of “multiple deficits” in the physical realm — allergic tendencies developing into major food intolerances, auto-immune symptoms that don’t classify, thyroid loss, and now joint damage. It’s really fun to be allergic to your prescribed medication and vitamins!
It’s a good thing to be alert to allergic reactions in kids and to try a chemical-reduced diet. That certainly is NOT the main or only cause of LD’s, but keeping allergies and intolerances down really does help.