WHAT CAUSES APD? APD may be genetic (having a tendency to occur in families). It may be congenital (a child may have undergone some stress or difficulty in-utero that induced APD). APD can also relate to deprivation. Children who are not adequately exposed to all of the speech sounds and listening experiences that are typically encountered by young infants and young children may not develop the same listening skills and abilities. This may occur as a result of a medical or social condition that deprives a child of consistent or expected auditory input. Considerable data suggests that children who experience frequent middle ear infections during critical auditory development periods (such as the first and second years of life) suffer such deprivation. APD may also be present as a result of neuro-maturational delays. The ability to recognize and separate sounds in the environment requires training via learning experiences. If a child's neurological system is not sophisticated enough to take advantage of the experiences of life the child will not develop a fully functional and integrated auditory system. In addition to a "pure auditory processing disorder", a condition in which children have isolated problems with the auditory or auditory/linguistic systems, there are also children who experience weaknesses in auditory processing as a result of more global processing disorders. For instance, children with autistic spectrum disorders have problems processing sensory information. They have difficulty with visual perception, tactile perception as well as auditory perception. Thus, a child with an autistic spectrum disorder may have difficulties with auditory perception, but that child is a very different child than one who has an isolated auditory processing disorder. Both require intervention to treat the listening problem, but the approaches may be quite different. |
