Walter E. Dunson, Jr., Ph.D.

Auditory processing ability refers to what happens to impulses of sound in the brain after the ears have received them.  Students with deficits in the area of auditory processing have trouble with the verbal comprehension skills associated with spoken words and ideas.  These students have difficulty remember what was said (i.e., following oral directions), are highly susceptible to distracting noises, and find it extremely difficult to master foreign languages. 

Auditory processing includes:

• hearing differences between sounds
• replicating a particular sound
• remembering general sound patterns
• segmenting words into individual sounds
• blending parts of words together
• rhyming