Central Auditory Processing Disorder: A Comorbid Condition.
Children with attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) are likely to present with difficulties in carrying out tasks that challenges the auditory nervous system. Their performance on central auditory processing tasks drops down in comparison with the other children. Cook et al5
found that 12 out of 15 subjects with attention disorder had associated auditory processing
deficit. Many other studies have also shown that children with ADHD perform poorly on auditory processing tasks than their normally developing peer.
Co-occurrence of the learning disability (LD) with CAPD and LD with ADHD10,11 is given as an explanation for the co-occurrence of CAPD and ADHD. Approximately 25-40% of children with ADHD have LD.12 Gomez and Condon, 1999 suggests that the processing deficits in audition are characteristic of LD than ADHD. Riccio et al8 suggested that the co morbidity observed between CAPD and ADHD could possibly reflect the limitations in accurate differential diagnosis using the present criteria and procedures.
Several authors have studied the auditory processing skills of children with ASD as it usually co-exists with CAPD.21 Children with ASD are more likely have CAPD than when compared to children without ASD. However, few features of both the disorders overlap on one another like shorter attention span, poor memory for auditory information, difficulty understanding speech in quiet and difficulty understanding speech especially in the presence of noise.
Younger children with SLI have weak auditory consciousness, and thus cannot employ redundant cues to understand speech. Older children with residual specific language disorder show fewer difficulties in comprehension and expression of spontaneous speech. However, they still exhibit difficulties in phonological level and on the auditory differentiation of phonemic distinctive features
Otolaryngol Open J. 2016; SE(1): S5-S9. doi: 10.17140/OTLOJ-SE-1-102