Has anyone had experience with auditory processing problems and social skills? My 7-year-old has mild to moderate auditory processing problems and I’m starting to see their effect on her social skills. She has trouble comprehending completely what the other kids are saying to her, especially with background noise going on. She also has trouble organizing her thoughts and communicating them clearly. She “sounds” like she’s not very bright
yet she’s making As and Bs. She has a great vocabulary yet sometimes she sounds like she just can’t find the words she needs to describe something.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there a software program that
would be helpful? Or maybe social skills classes that would help her
with communication skills?
Re: Auditory Processing
A good SLP will be of great help for your daughter. My son has some processing problems and his speech teacher has provided me with extra excercises to help with this issue. Real concentration on careful listening will help.
Actually you could make some of your own work sheets using words 4 in a row example pear apple bear peach what is different what is the same, what ryhmes?
We do a lot of words with d,b,p since they can cause auditory confussion. Practice having her look in a mirror saying words, placing her had on her throat feeling sounds.
Re: Auditory Processing
Try:
http://www.ldonline.org/ld_indepth/process_deficit/living_working.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~mcoleman/cpdadd.html
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/capd.html
Re: Auditory Processing
Find a good Speech and Language Pathologist. Don’t bother with testing by the school system. They’re under a lot of pressure to deny services. You’ll probably have to pay for private testing. My daughter has auditory processing problems that were not adequately addressed when she was in school and, believe me, it has far-reaching consequences. I was advised to find a social skills group for my daughter when she was in 4th grade but we live in a rural area and the only group anywhere close was being run by someone I didn’t trust. I urge you to get help for your child now. Problems communicating with peers will only get a lot more critical in middle school. Depression is a common result. Good luck to you!
Re: Auditory Processing
Get whatever audio problems they have nailed down as best you can, and pay attention to social aspects as well as educational & work ones.
I have this, and just really found out about what it means today, I had very limited and very little knowledge about this previously, and if you perservere with it (it’s important to pay attention to it beyond grade school too), you will save your child no end of hell, and in all probability contribute a great deal to their sucess as they grow up & into adulthood. Trust me on that one, this is important not to overlook, and contrary to the deal with it / don’t deal with it approach based on the idea of incomplete knowledge, there’s enough data floating around at this point to where you can get a good idea of it’s existance, and of it’s degree if it is present. If it is there, it is guarenteed NOT to be something that’s best adressed by a binary functional approach.
The better diagnosis you have, the more precise, the more lattitude you have in compensation. For instance, I have crappy audio processing in terms of messages just getting through and processed. But I have pretty good memory, and have developed a really good memory for audio conversations, becasue I’ve found I can go back and digest them in easier chunks from memory to form conclusions more at a pace I can manage.
That’s just one example of a compensatory technique that I developed unknowingly, that’s specific to me. There seems to be a lot of variety with this, and a lot of combinations, perhaps you can find compensatory combinations too if you puzzle with the matrix (there’s a matrix floating around the site here I belive) associated with the problem.
Whatever you do, don’t ignore it, don’t let it fade as being some sort of done deal & something to check off of a list as your child learns to compensate for it. And watch out for treating it’s symptoms like they’re a moral problem. Your kid will get plenty of that later in life, they need ammunition to deal with it and fight it from you if you can offer it in any way. They don’t need a prelude to the reactions they’re going to get from the world when they’re adults.
A good speech therapist who is trained in LD issues could help, both with comprehension, word retrieval, and organizing thinking (which effects word retrieval). Does your daughter also have executive function problems (this would impact her ability to quickly organize her thinking).
Social skill groups are great because she can experience success in a controlled setting which will help self esteem, even though it may not translate to the playing field. It might also help her (over time) learn to speak up to her peers about her needs.