Auditory Processing

Much has been written about auditory processing and its link to receptive language. Speech perception abilities should not be viewed as being separate from language, but as part of an integrated whole.

Children's ability to listen to, keep in memory, and process what is heard has an impact on their ability to understand new words and add those words to their lexicon (mental dictionary).

The ability to listen to and correctly interpret a conversation partner's speech is a higher order skill that is performed in the brain's language centres. As such it is considered a higher order language related function.


Good listening and auditory memory skills become critically important when a child makes the transition from pre-school to their first year of school.


Children generally move from an environment, such as home or pre-school, where most of their language skills were learnt in a familiar context. Classroom discourse (conversation that is teacher directed) is different. Much of the language is decontextualized and challenging to learn.


Children with intact listening and auditory memory abilities, are better able to understand verbal messages - such as teacher instructions and the conversational speech of their peers.


In contrast, school-age children that have difficulty with auditory processing and listening to instructions, have a much harder time understanding and interpreting oral language.


Consequently, these children don't have the same advantages in terms of building their vocabularies. Social skills can also be affected, in that children with auditory processing difficulty tend to have difficulty responding to the rapid and arbitrary social language of their peers.

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