[senco-forum] any advice please

Hi Philip

Quick answer yes, and before you get excited by the thought of a short reply
from just hang on lol

Aly has covered much of the ground in her reply. 
What I have to remember is that I am almost a worst case scenario with
regard to APD, so others who have some degree of APD including my sons do
not have all the same issues as me. Another important factor which may not
apply to most who have APD is that I am also a natural Visual-Spatial
Learner so I naturally have a learning style to help me design coping
strategies for my APD.

Auditory Processing is the medical Term for listening, or processing sound
based communication, or processing all that you hear. And Speech is a human
form of sound communication. So those who have a listening problem are
deemed to have an Auditory Processing Disorder. (Definition out of the way)

The first sign of potential APD issues will probably be late speech
development. Very young APDs will soon be subconsciously be aware that they
are missing bits of sound information, how this is done I have no idea, but
why else would they begin to develop coping strategies to work around their
auditory processing deficit. How do we learn to speak, by hearing and
listening to out parents and peers speak and then reprocessing this in our
own form of speech. So children have problems processing the input speech of
the parents etc and so have problems developing and processing their own
speech, and many become perfectionists at this early age making sure we can
say the words correctly. 
Having APD can be like watching a film on a faulty television, when the
sound is out of sync, and/or the wire from the amplifier to the speakers has
come loose and sometimes looses all contact. So you have to guess from
context and other coping strategies as best you can to fill in the sound
processing gaps.
Young APDs struggle to follow conversations and verbal instructions,
especially because they are young there will be many new words and
associations that they will not be able to guess correctly due to their lack
of life experiences to work from. So a frequent comment is "You were not
listening to me" or "You need to learn to listen". When playing games like
"Simon Says" or out on the playground; APDs are on the outside looking in
wishing that they could join in like the others. Verbal Self advocacy is a
problem so peers, teachers, parents, etc who have better verbal advocacy
skills always win a verbal argument regardless of the strength of their
case. So APDs are potentially the targets of verbal bullying and are unable
to verbally defend themselves during an argument, they can probably work out
later when it is too late what they should have said. They are not able to
follow the conversations with their peers in the playground, probably
because there is too much background noise 
Background noise or pink sound (cafeteria levels of background noise)is a
problems for most APDs. As I mentioned earlier a young APD begins to develop
coping strategies from very early on, and one of these coping strategies is
expand the range hearing and listening of sound frequencies to try and
compensate for the processing failures. This has been described as
developing "wolfs hearing", So we hear more and this means we may have sleep
problems, because we have to switch off all our Auditory senses to enable us
to sleep, so any alarms in the night may not be heard when we are asleep, so
we would not respond to fire alarms when asleep, or difficult to wake up
using an alarm clock.
Guessing the missed bits. 
This can be done in part by using human communication skills others do not
need to develop. So we learn to lip read, read body language, and eye
contact. And because others do not use eye contact so much this can be
embarrassing, or if we are watching others to read their visual
communication they think we are LOOKING at or watching them for potentially
other less favourable reasons. 
The other thing we do is to try and anticipate all the possible events of
the day to come and predict as many possible variations of events so that we
are not let down when we have an information processing failure. So the more
predictable and routine a days program is the better able we are to build
our coping strategies so that out guesses are more likely to be correct. New
words and terminology in new situations are our biggest problems we can not
anticipate or allow for our processing failures and our ability to guess
correctly decreases.
Our problem is that we become so used to guessing the bits we miss, that we
are not aware that we may have guessed wrong, our guesses are made so that
all the information we have including the gaps makes sense to us, which may
not be any thing like the intended original message.
There is a simulation of what is supposed to be like being APD on the NCAPD
web site. http://www.ncapd.org But this is not for all APDs. One member of
this forum has describes it like listening and not understanding  to foreign
language in say a film it all sound like one continuous noise. Which takes
me back, to the early subconscious development of coping strategies. As part
of my APD assessment, ( think it is called the gap test) using a set of
headphones I had say whether I had heard or processed 1 or 2 blips, the test
is about the range of sound frequencies I can process. So my replies were
either "ONE" or "PROBABLY 2". The "PROBABLY 2" was because I worked out that
two blips took longer than 1. But it did not process any gap between the two
blips for any frequency. So from this I should not be able to process the
gaps in speech, BUT For speech patterns I can anticipate I developed a
coping strategy from very young to insert a gap. So for accents and
reasonably paced speech I can process or fill in the gaps quite well. But
take away a coping strategy like the Telephone takes away my visual coping
strategies, so call centres are a problem, especially if they are not local,
people who do not look at you when they talk to you or hid their faces when
they are talking we rely on their facial expressions (body language)as a
back up coping strategy. 

I am rambling on again.

I hope it helps explain a few things.
(have a look at the artcles by Damien Howard in the first couple of APDUK
Newsletters:- Adult Research "Coping with Strangers" and "Managing the
Chaos" http://apd.apduk.org/newsletter.htm 

Best wishes

Graeme

-----Original Message-----
From: Philip MacMillan [mailto:P.Macmillan at exeter.ac.uk] 
Sent: 02 February 2007 19:48
To: dolfrog; 'Ruth Newbury'; '1BECTA Senco'
Subject: Re: [senco-forum] any advice please

Graeme, A question, do individuals with APD have problems in dealing with
the perception of incoming speech,  if so what are the usual signs of this?

Philip EP

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