Central Auditory Processing Disorder in Children.
Auditory processing disorder, commonly called as Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD) that affects 5% of school aged children. According to Chermak et al, 2007, the prevalence of CAPD is 2-3% in pediatric population and nearly 70% in geriatric population.1 The professional dealing with these children from screening, diagnosis and management are Audiologists. Recently, there has been huge increase in public and professionals awareness of Auditory Processing.
CAPD is a broad term which indicates a mixture of disorder that has an impact on the way our brain processes the auditory signals or auditory information. Although the Children with CAPD have normal outer, middle and inner ear functioning, they cannot able to process the auditory information in the same way as other children process it, which causes difficulties in understanding speech and interpreting sound. Studies in this area reported that this difficulty happens due to dysfunction in central auditory nervous system. CAPD can affect children as well as adult and literature also reported that males are twice as likely to have CAPD compared to females. According to Keith2 in 1986 CAPD refers to the inability or impaired ability to attend to, discriminate, recognize or comprehend information presented auditory, even though the person has normal intelligence and hearing sensitivity.
American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA)4 in 1996 reported that any difficulties in behavioral phenomena like sound localization, sound lateralization, auditory pattern recognition, auditory discrimination, temporal aspect of audition, auditory performance in competing acoustic signal and auditory performance in adverse listening condition can be sign of CAPD.
Otolaryngol Open J. 2016; SE(1): Se1-Se2. doi: 10.17140/OTLOJ-SE1-e001
