Auditory Processing and Sound Therapy

Learning Difficulties Linked to Auditory Processing

Today it seems that more and more children have learning difficulties, which means they struggle to keep up where they should be progressing with natural ease. Auditory processing is often hard to identify and may be mistaken at first for hearing loss or just not being very bright.

Jeanette told how her son suffered a range of difficulties in his early years.

“He had taken a very long time to walk and he didn’t crawl for very long. With my background in remedial education, I had a feeling, from these early experiences, that we were in for trouble ahead,” she said. Her son had problems with his immunity and a lot of ear infections and there were signs that his coordination and his fine and gross motor skills were not as good as they should be. “The problems became obvious once he started having to show his skills in reading and writing.”

Jeanette described how her son came home one day, when he was in the third grade, at a very caring school, saying that he “felt dumb and stupid”. “I knew that he was in fact a very bright child, but he just couldn’t cope at school,” she explained. She then went on to try many remedial approaches including kinesiology, looking at his diet, occupational therapy as well as speech therapy. “With all the therapies I did see changes for the better,” she said, but he was still struggling to learn and retain information.”

After trying many other therapies, Jeanette then looked into sensory integration and auditory processing and how it impacted on listening, comprehension and reading. “I knew that he could not process the sounds of the words,” she said. “He just could not get the information from the hearing mechanism to the brain, which was the auditory processing aspect.”

After a long journey to many practitioners, she started her son on Sound Therapy when he was twelve. Jeanette says about Sound Therapy, “The changes that resulted made every dollar I spent very worthwhile.”

Much evidence points to the fact that learning difficulties are in some way linked to ear function. Therefore, a therapy which improves the ear’s performance is a direct and easy way to assist with learning. Sound Therapy is different from music therapy because it uses specially treated sound, intended to physically improve the way the ear works, as opposed to just using music for an emotional impact.

Successful listening and learning depends on good auditory processing. Auditory processing means the ability to translate the stream of vocal speech sounds into words and meaning, and then recreate those sounds as speech. These are complex skills, and this shows that there is a great deal more than just hearing required for successful use of language.

Describing the changes in her son, Jeanette said “Previously, study had been painstaking and laborious. Now there was a difference. We started doing a remedial reading program and one day he said to me, “Mum I can read that word now.” and I said, “How? What do you mean?” and he said, “I can just see it.” What he was doing was not only “seeing” the word, he was able to hear the sound in his head and connect the sound with the letters on the page and that was the beginning of his true reading.”