Friday, April 30, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Auditory Processing Disorder
Little-Known Disorder Can Take a Toll on Learning
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Ms. O’Donnell’s quest to help her son led her to Lois Kam Heymann, left, an auditory therapist, whom Blake now works with.
Parents and teachers often tell children to pay attention — to be a “good listener.” But what if your child’s brain doesn’t know how to listen?
That’s the challenge for children with auditory processing disorder, a poorly understood syndrome that interferes with the brain’s ability to recognize and interpret sounds. It’s been estimated that 2 to 5 percent of children have the disorder, said Gail D. Chermak, an expert on speech and hearing sciences at Washington State University, and it’s likely that many cases have gone undiagnosed or misdiagnosed.
The symptoms of A.P.D. — trouble paying attention and following directions, low academic performance, behavior problems and poor reading and vocabulary — are often mistaken for attention problems or even autism.
But now the disorder is getting some overdue attention, thanks in part to the talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell and her 10-year-old son, Blake, who has A.P.D.
In the foreword to a new book, “The Sound of Hope” (Ballantine) — by Lois Kam Heymann, the speech pathologist and auditory therapist who helped Blake — Ms. O’Donnell recounts how she learned something was amiss.
It began with a haircut before her son started first grade. Blake had already been working with a speech therapist on his vague responses and other difficulties, so when he asked for a “little haircut” and she pressed him on his meaning, she told the barber he wanted short hair like his brother’s. But in the car later, Blake erupted in tears, and Ms. O’Donnell realized her mistake. By “little haircut,” Blake meant little hair should be cut. He wanted a trim.
“I pulled off on the freeway and hugged him,” Ms. O’Donnell said. “I said: ‘Blakey, I’m really sorry. I didn’t understand you. I’ll do better.’ ”
That was a turning point. Ms. O’Donnell’s quest to do better led her to Ms. Heymann, who determined that while Blake could hear perfectly well, he had trouble distinguishing between sounds. To him, words like “tangerine” and “tambourine,” “bed” and “dead,” may sound the same.
“The child hears ‘And the girl went to dead,’ and they know it doesn’t make sense,” Ms. Heymann told me. “But while they try to figure it out, the teacher continues talking and now they’re behind. Those sounds are being distorted or misinterpreted, and it affects how the child is going to learn speech and language.”
Blake’s brain struggled to retain the words he heard, resulting in a limited vocabulary and trouble with reading and spelling. Abstract language, metaphors like “cover third base,” even “knock-knock” jokes, were confusing and frustrating.
Children with auditory processing problems often can’t filter out other sounds. The teacher’s voice, a chair scraping the floor and crinkling paper are all heard at the same level. “The normal reaction by the parent is ‘Why don’t you listen?’ ” Ms. Heymann said. “They were listening, but they weren’t hearing the right thing.”
The solution is often a comprehensive approach, at school and at home. To dampen unwanted noise, strips of felt or tennis balls may be placed on the legs of chairs and desks. Parents work to simplify language and avoid metaphors and abstract references.
The O’Donnell household cut back on large, noisy gatherings that were upsetting to Blake. Twice-weekly sessions focusing on sounds and words, using rhyme and body gestures, helped him catch up on the learning he had missed.
Help inside the classroom is essential. One family in Westchester County, who asked not to be named to protect their son’s privacy, met with his teachers and agreed on an array of adaptations — including having his teacher wear a small microphone that directed her voice more clearly to a speaker on the student’s desk so he could better distinguish her voice from competing sounds.
Nobody knows exactly why auditory processing skills don’t fully develop in every child, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Scientists are conducting brain-imaging studies to better understand the neural basis of the condition and find out if there are different forms.
Reassuringly, the disorder seems to have little or nothing to do with intelligence. Blake has an encyclopedic knowledge of animals — he once corrected his mother for referring to a puma as a mountain lion. The Westchester child is now a 17-year-old high school student being recruited by top colleges.
“He’s in accelerated Latin, honors science classes,” said his mother. “I remember I used to dream of the day he would be able to wake up in the morning and just say, ‘Mommy.’ ”
Not every child does so well, and some children with A.P.D. have other developmental and social problems. But Ms. O’Donnell says that treatment is not just about better grades.
“It definitely affected his whole world,” she said of her son. “Not just learning. It cuts them off from society, from interactions. To see the difference in who he is today versus who he was two years ago, and then to contemplate what would have happened had we not been able to catch it — I think he would have been lost.”
A version of this article appeared in print on April 27, 2010, on page D5 of the New York edition.
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An A.D.H.D. Student Finds Confidence on the Track
Navigating the Special Education System
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A ‘Dose of Nature’ for Attention Problems
Treating Attention Deficit Without Drugs
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From 1 to 25 of 148 Comments
1 2 3 ... 6 Next »
1. April 26, 2010
5:26 pm
Link
APD sounds very much like the audio distortions that occur to those of us who have some hearing loss in the mid-range of audible frequencies. That surely causes havoc trying to follow conversations at a noisy restaurant or raucous dinner table.
Host: Would you like a little more soup?
Hard of hearing guest: No, I don’t think I’d like to go sit on the widow Moore’s stoop. But thanks for asking.
I’m pretty sure some of my auditory twisting came from conditioned listening to my dear Tarheel mother who was known to bemoan the fact that that America had dropped “the Atomic Bum” on Japan. For years I had visions of a massive Clem Kadiddlehopper being hoisted out of the Enola Gay over Hiroshima. The horror, the horror.
Of course auditory distortion in daily life can be no laughing matter if you are trying to comprehend what’s going on in a classroom. At least now there are some strategies and tools to help out. If nothing else works, you can try, “What did you say?”
— ca
2. April 26, 2010
5:28 pm
Link
Listening skills are fundamental to reading–according to brain science researcher & “brain trainer”, Dr. Michael Merzenich.
Here’s an excerpt from his interview with Dr. Ginger Campbell:
Click here for the whole transcript from Brain Science Podcasts:
http://docartemis.com/Transcripts/54-brainscience-Merzenich.pdf
Ginger Campbell: So you have to learn to listen right before you can learn how to read.
Michael Merzenich: “It’s only when you’re sorting information appropriately does this translation of- I mean after all, reading is simply based upon the translation of what you hear in a written form.
And if what you hear is not represented in the brain in the normal way, it’s a very bad representational system. It really doesn’t represent what you hear.
So unless you correct that- unless you correct the listening, you cannot really generate a reader.
I mean you can do it only by using alternative strategies for reading, but you can’t use a phonological approach to reading.
You have to use a whole-word or other approach- then you can be successful. But you can’t use the classical efficient approaches to learn to read. So you have to correct the listening to correct the reading.”
— The Healthy Librarian
3. April 26, 2010
5:32 pm
Link
My oldest (currently 19) and adopted at age 3 from El Salvador, had auditory processing disorder.
When she was 5 we were told she would never learn to read, was mentally retarded, ADHD etc. etc.
What helped even more than the teacher wearing a microphone was going through Fast Forword. This is a computerized auditory processing program that is basically auditory exercises (2 hours/day x 6 weeks). It has been published (under “HAILO”) in both Science and Nature and has been validated in numerous double blind studies.
http://www.scilearn.com
http://www.fastforword.com
It made a huge difference. She was saying “I can understand my teacher within a couple of weeks of starting it. Her IQ increased by 50 points over five years. Currently she’s a B student in college.
— Shari DeSilva
4. April 26, 2010
5:56 pm
Link
When my daughter was in grade school, there was a big discrepancy between some of her skill levels. Though her teacher was not necessarily alarmed, I was. I had her tested and discovered she had an auditory perceptual defecit. She literally could not distinguish between sounds that we all take for granted, as different. She worked with a therapist, addressing those issues specifically. She is a college graduate, who had earned merit scholarships.
If your gut tells you something is not quite right, listen to it. Better to be told you’re wrong or overreacting, that to miss the boat with an unattended problem that could have been improved.
— lessi
5. April 26, 2010
6:38 pm
Link
My neice has been diagnosed 16 years ago. She has her drivers license and just got into college. She is aware of her needs and can ask for study guides and support from her teachers. She learned to advocate and to self soothe her anxiety. She is an A student and will be studying speech pathology.
— brooklyn
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Ms. O’Donnell’s quest to help her son led her to Lois Kam Heymann, left, an auditory therapist, whom Blake now works with.
Parents and teachers often tell children to pay attention — to be a “good listener.” But what if your child’s brain doesn’t know how to listen?
That’s the challenge for children with auditory processing disorder, a poorly understood syndrome that interferes with the brain’s ability to recognize and interpret sounds. It’s been estimated that 2 to 5 percent of children have the disorder, said Gail D. Chermak, an expert on speech and hearing sciences at Washington State University, and it’s likely that many cases have gone undiagnosed or misdiagnosed.
The symptoms of A.P.D. — trouble paying attention and following directions, low academic performance, behavior problems and poor reading and vocabulary — are often mistaken for attention problems or even autism.
But now the disorder is getting some overdue attention, thanks in part to the talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell and her 10-year-old son, Blake, who has A.P.D.
In the foreword to a new book, “The Sound of Hope” (Ballantine) — by Lois Kam Heymann, the speech pathologist and auditory therapist who helped Blake — Ms. O’Donnell recounts how she learned something was amiss.
It began with a haircut before her son started first grade. Blake had already been working with a speech therapist on his vague responses and other difficulties, so when he asked for a “little haircut” and she pressed him on his meaning, she told the barber he wanted short hair like his brother’s. But in the car later, Blake erupted in tears, and Ms. O’Donnell realized her mistake. By “little haircut,” Blake meant little hair should be cut. He wanted a trim.
“I pulled off on the freeway and hugged him,” Ms. O’Donnell said. “I said: ‘Blakey, I’m really sorry. I didn’t understand you. I’ll do better.’ ”
That was a turning point. Ms. O’Donnell’s quest to do better led her to Ms. Heymann, who determined that while Blake could hear perfectly well, he had trouble distinguishing between sounds. To him, words like “tangerine” and “tambourine,” “bed” and “dead,” may sound the same.
“The child hears ‘And the girl went to dead,’ and they know it doesn’t make sense,” Ms. Heymann told me. “But while they try to figure it out, the teacher continues talking and now they’re behind. Those sounds are being distorted or misinterpreted, and it affects how the child is going to learn speech and language.”
Blake’s brain struggled to retain the words he heard, resulting in a limited vocabulary and trouble with reading and spelling. Abstract language, metaphors like “cover third base,” even “knock-knock” jokes, were confusing and frustrating.
Children with auditory processing problems often can’t filter out other sounds. The teacher’s voice, a chair scraping the floor and crinkling paper are all heard at the same level. “The normal reaction by the parent is ‘Why don’t you listen?’ ” Ms. Heymann said. “They were listening, but they weren’t hearing the right thing.”
The solution is often a comprehensive approach, at school and at home. To dampen unwanted noise, strips of felt or tennis balls may be placed on the legs of chairs and desks. Parents work to simplify language and avoid metaphors and abstract references.
The O’Donnell household cut back on large, noisy gatherings that were upsetting to Blake. Twice-weekly sessions focusing on sounds and words, using rhyme and body gestures, helped him catch up on the learning he had missed.
Help inside the classroom is essential. One family in Westchester County, who asked not to be named to protect their son’s privacy, met with his teachers and agreed on an array of adaptations — including having his teacher wear a small microphone that directed her voice more clearly to a speaker on the student’s desk so he could better distinguish her voice from competing sounds.
Nobody knows exactly why auditory processing skills don’t fully develop in every child, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Scientists are conducting brain-imaging studies to better understand the neural basis of the condition and find out if there are different forms.
Reassuringly, the disorder seems to have little or nothing to do with intelligence. Blake has an encyclopedic knowledge of animals — he once corrected his mother for referring to a puma as a mountain lion. The Westchester child is now a 17-year-old high school student being recruited by top colleges.
“He’s in accelerated Latin, honors science classes,” said his mother. “I remember I used to dream of the day he would be able to wake up in the morning and just say, ‘Mommy.’ ”
Not every child does so well, and some children with A.P.D. have other developmental and social problems. But Ms. O’Donnell says that treatment is not just about better grades.
“It definitely affected his whole world,” she said of her son. “Not just learning. It cuts them off from society, from interactions. To see the difference in who he is today versus who he was two years ago, and then to contemplate what would have happened had we not been able to catch it — I think he would have been lost.”
A version of this article appeared in print on April 27, 2010, on page D5 of the New York edition.
E-mail This Print
Share
Sign in to Recommend
Well, ADD, adhd, auditory processing disorder, learning disabilities
Related Posts
FROM WELL
An A.D.H.D. Student Finds Confidence on the Track
Navigating the Special Education System
Testing a Child for Learning Disabilities
A ‘Dose of Nature’ for Attention Problems
Treating Attention Deficit Without Drugs
Previous post
The Slushie Workout
Next post
Living for Years With Late-Stage Cancer
From 1 to 25 of 148 Comments
1 2 3 ... 6 Next »
1. April 26, 2010
5:26 pm
Link
APD sounds very much like the audio distortions that occur to those of us who have some hearing loss in the mid-range of audible frequencies. That surely causes havoc trying to follow conversations at a noisy restaurant or raucous dinner table.
Host: Would you like a little more soup?
Hard of hearing guest: No, I don’t think I’d like to go sit on the widow Moore’s stoop. But thanks for asking.
I’m pretty sure some of my auditory twisting came from conditioned listening to my dear Tarheel mother who was known to bemoan the fact that that America had dropped “the Atomic Bum” on Japan. For years I had visions of a massive Clem Kadiddlehopper being hoisted out of the Enola Gay over Hiroshima. The horror, the horror.
Of course auditory distortion in daily life can be no laughing matter if you are trying to comprehend what’s going on in a classroom. At least now there are some strategies and tools to help out. If nothing else works, you can try, “What did you say?”
— ca
2. April 26, 2010
5:28 pm
Link
Listening skills are fundamental to reading–according to brain science researcher & “brain trainer”, Dr. Michael Merzenich.
Here’s an excerpt from his interview with Dr. Ginger Campbell:
Click here for the whole transcript from Brain Science Podcasts:
http://docartemis.com/Transcripts/54-brainscience-Merzenich.pdf
Ginger Campbell: So you have to learn to listen right before you can learn how to read.
Michael Merzenich: “It’s only when you’re sorting information appropriately does this translation of- I mean after all, reading is simply based upon the translation of what you hear in a written form.
And if what you hear is not represented in the brain in the normal way, it’s a very bad representational system. It really doesn’t represent what you hear.
So unless you correct that- unless you correct the listening, you cannot really generate a reader.
I mean you can do it only by using alternative strategies for reading, but you can’t use a phonological approach to reading.
You have to use a whole-word or other approach- then you can be successful. But you can’t use the classical efficient approaches to learn to read. So you have to correct the listening to correct the reading.”
— The Healthy Librarian
3. April 26, 2010
5:32 pm
Link
My oldest (currently 19) and adopted at age 3 from El Salvador, had auditory processing disorder.
When she was 5 we were told she would never learn to read, was mentally retarded, ADHD etc. etc.
What helped even more than the teacher wearing a microphone was going through Fast Forword. This is a computerized auditory processing program that is basically auditory exercises (2 hours/day x 6 weeks). It has been published (under “HAILO”) in both Science and Nature and has been validated in numerous double blind studies.
http://www.scilearn.com
http://www.fastforword.com
It made a huge difference. She was saying “I can understand my teacher within a couple of weeks of starting it. Her IQ increased by 50 points over five years. Currently she’s a B student in college.
— Shari DeSilva
4. April 26, 2010
5:56 pm
Link
When my daughter was in grade school, there was a big discrepancy between some of her skill levels. Though her teacher was not necessarily alarmed, I was. I had her tested and discovered she had an auditory perceptual defecit. She literally could not distinguish between sounds that we all take for granted, as different. She worked with a therapist, addressing those issues specifically. She is a college graduate, who had earned merit scholarships.
If your gut tells you something is not quite right, listen to it. Better to be told you’re wrong or overreacting, that to miss the boat with an unattended problem that could have been improved.
— lessi
5. April 26, 2010
6:38 pm
Link
My neice has been diagnosed 16 years ago. She has her drivers license and just got into college. She is aware of her needs and can ask for study guides and support from her teachers. She learned to advocate and to self soothe her anxiety. She is an A student and will be studying speech pathology.
— brooklyn
Thursday, April 22, 2010
From the NYT
useums Take Their Lessons to the Schools
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: April 21, 2010
SUTTON, Mass. — Sitting in the dark, knees crossed, looking up at the stars projected on the planetarium dome, the fourth-grade class might have been on a field trip to the Museum of Science in Boston.
Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times
Brooke Annis, center, a fourth grader in Sutton, Mass., inside a traveling planetarium.
Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times
Nicholas Culross, a kindergartner at the Simonian Center for Early Learning, walked in a dinosaur’s footprints during a traveling lesson from Christina Moscat.
But instead, they were having what Katie Slivensky, an educator from the museum, calls a “backwards field trip” in a portable, inflatable planetarium set up for the morning in the old gym at Sutton High School — a 50-minute lesson on the stars, moon and planets, tied to state learning standards for physical science, earth and space.
Over the last few years, many schools have eliminated or cut back on museum trips, partly because of tight budgets that make it hard to pay for a bus and museum admission, and partly because of the growing emphasis on “seat time” to cover all the material on state tests.
To make up for the decline in visits, many museums are taking their lessons to the classroom, through traveling programs, videoconferencing or computer-based lessons that use their collections as a teaching tool.
“Even if they can’t come to the museum, we can bring the excitement of science to the school,” said Ms. Slivensky, one of seven traveling educators at the Boston museum.
At the Museum of Science, where school visits have dropped about 30 percent since 2007, demand for the 14 school travel programs — from the $280 “Animal Adaptations” to the $445 “Cryogenics’ — is booming.
Annette Sawyer, director of education and enrichment programs, said the museum would do almost 1,000 travel programs next year, 400 more than four years ago.
On a sunny spring morning, the Sutton schools, about an hour from Boston, have brought in both the planetarium program and, for the kindergarten, “Dig Into Dinosaurs.”
“It’s $275 a bus, and we’d need three buses for a grade level,” said Michael Breault, the principal. “We pay for field trips and special assemblies from a magazine fund-raiser at the beginning of the year, and this year, we didn’t sell as many magazines.”
And museum admission costs $7.50 a head.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
iphone and reading
My iPhone has revolutionised my reading
For dyslexics, books are much easier to read on its screen
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 6 April 2010 19.30 BST
- Article history
Treasure Island . . . a recently discovered pleasure.
I was hopeless at school, messy and terrible at spelling. And although the term dyslexia was not something I came across until much later in life, when I did I understood immediately that I had a number of its symptoms. My writing often had a jumbled logic. The advent of computers, of course, brought spell-checkers, but even so my word blindness can carry such conviction that I sometimes find myself staring incredulously at the red line underneath words, before finally realising that "during" does not begin with a "J".
I'm reasonably well read but I read slowly; books have always been a struggle. I read one sentence, which sparks a thought, maybe causing my eyes to flicker, and I lose my place.
Recently, at the age of 57, I got an iPhone. Like many, I spent the first few hours loading up apps, including a Classics book app. Some weeks later, while mending a client's computer, waiting for the blue line to progress slowly across the screen, I began reading. The first thing I noticed was that, while familiar with many of the books on the app, having seen a film version or been read them as a child, I had not myself read a single one. Books which would have been part of many a youthful literary diet had passed me by. Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer – I hadn't read any of them (but I have now).
The first title I selected was The Count of Monte Cristo. I raced through this on my iPhone in just over a week, my wife asking why I was continually playing with my iPhone. When I'd finished I enjoyed the story so much that I went to buy a copy for a friend. In the bookshop I was amazed. It was more than 1,000 pages! Had I been presented with the book in this form I would never have read it. It would have been too much like climbing a mountain.
So why I had found it easier to read from my iPhone? First, an ordinary page of text is split into about four pages. The spacing seems generous and because of this I don't get lost on the page. Second, the handset's brightness makes it easier to take in words. "Many dyslexics have problems with 'crowding', where they're distracted by the words surrounding the word they're trying to read," says John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University and chair of the Dyslexia Research Trust. "When reading text on a small phone, you're reducing the crowding effect."
I was so impressed that I contacted the Dyslexia Society, where Sue Flohr, herself dyslexic, recounted how her iPhone had changed her life. She told me that many others share my experience reading books and the society is in talks with the government over making school textbooks available as eBooks. Flohr said that her iPhone has not only brought greater organisation to her life, it has greatly improved her sense of self-esteem. I share this sense and now see that when I proudly show off my iPhone to others it is not just a new bit of technology, but the centrepoint of my newly ordered life.
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