[senco-forum] Alice

Hi Alice,

Anyone with a phonological difficulty may have APD. 
The ability to accurately process the sound in words
is directly affected if a person cannot accurately
process sound. Their ability to "get over it", to be
remediated, depends on the degree to which they are
affected. Those severely affected may never be able to
process phonemes accurately. Visual and hands-on
teaching is therefore recommended for them. Of course
those with visual impairments, this is not possible so
kinaesthetic methods are best employed. This, as you
will see below, may not work for all.

If someone has APD they may not be able to
discriminate sounds, i.e.phonemic awareness. This may
also be intermittent, they may process a sound
correctly at one time and incorrectly at another time.
This all adds to the confusion. As does the fact that
most, I suspect all, people with APD will have
problems distinguishing speech from ambient noise and
many have hypersensitive hearing, so all that they
hear is magnified, also making the sounds they should
be processing more difficult to pick out.

Those who are visually impaired do not have the
benefit of visual cues to aid them, but may also not
be distracted by visual input as others are. They may
also however have a heightened sense of hearing, so
all noise, as above, is magnified, making speech even
harder to discern, and will not have the benefit of
visual cues but may well have a heightened
kinaesthetic modality to compensate.

Those with APD may also have phonological difficulties
e.g. the inability to blend sounds, distinguish onset
and rime, use rhyme etc. 

They may also have phone-grapheme correlation problems
- if they cannot recognise that "a" sounds like we 
know "a" sounds, as in cat, then they will not be able
to recognise the letter a as corresponding to a, e, i,
o, or u - depending on how the sound a is processed by
their brain. Ten minutes later it could be processed
as something else. Hope this makes sense.

The same sort of sound-symbol problems would apply for
a person using braille if the symbol for "a" does not,
to them, represent what "a", to them, sounds like. 

They are just some of the characteristic difficulties
of APD and a person may just have one of them or may
have more or all. There are many more such as poor
short term auditory memory, sound location, tonal
difficulties, auditory sequencing problems etc. to be
considered. These can all affect literacy and a whole
lot more.

Please see here for evidence of APD as a cause of
"dyslexia"

http://www.infolinks.apduk.org/audiovisual_dyselxia.htm

Thank you for being so keen to open minds about APD. I
hope the day goes well for you. I hope this helps.
Please let me know if I can do any more.

Best wishes,
Aly

Chair Auditory Processing Disorder in the UK/APDUK
www.lacewingmultimedia.com/APD.htm 
www.apduk.org

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