Reading & Auditory Processing

Reading & Auditory Processing

Reading Requires Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness is a fundamental reading skill. It is the understanding that language is made up of individual sounds (phonemes) which are put together to form the words we write and speak. This is a fundamental precursor to reading. Children who have difficulty with phonological awareness will often be unable to recognize or isolate the individual sounds in a word, recognize similarities between words (as in rhyming words), or be able to identify the number of sounds in a word.

Many poor readers have a specific weakness in phonological processing even though their other processing skills (auditory and language processing) are strong. This is because hearing distinct phonemes (so that they can be recognized as text on a page), particularly so-called blends such as |bl| or |spr|, require processing at up to 40 sounds a second. This is far more demanding that the processing required for spoken language -- hearing words as whole sounds not broken down into phonemes.
Phonological processing for reading requires these specific skill

·         Auditory discrimination: the ability to recognize differences in phonemes (sounds). This includes the ability to identify words and sounds that are similar and those which are different.

·         Auditory memory: the ability to store and recall information which was given verbally. An individual with difficulties in this area may not be able to follow instructions given verbally or may have trouble recalling information from a story read aloud.

·         Auditory sequencing: the ability to remember or reconstruct the order of items in a list or the order of sounds in a word or syllable. One example is saying or writing "ephelant" for "elephant."

·         Auditory blending: the process of putting together phonemes to form words. For example, the individual phonemes "c", "a", and "t" are blended to form the word "cat".

Auditory processing related reading difficulties often linger for a lifetime because these essential cognitive skills are typically not addressed at school. They are deep seated auditory processing disorders that cannot be corrected by word lists and other conventional methods.