The capacities involved in processing and interpreting auditory information, or what the brain does with what we hear. These capacities can include: the ability to pay attention to the spoken word (e.g., to pick out a person's voice from background noise), the ability to hear differences in sounds (e.g., “pat” vs. “pack”), the ability to remember what is heard, and the ability to comprehend what is heard (e.g., understand grammar). Early assessment provides important information that may lead to specific strategies that can be used to enable children to tune into the world with what is already available to them. For example, a child's location relative to a noisy air conditioner or a speaker, may have an impact. Also, giving directions in shorter sentences may help your child's auditory processing significantly. There are specific therapeutic approaches to helping children with auditory processing difficulties (e.g., Tomatis, Fast ForWord). You can also use yourself within a Floortime session to give your child's auditory processing a boost. Adding visual cues to auditory input will help the child whose auditory processing needs some support.
The ability to act upon auditory information in order to generalize, abstract, classify, integrate, etc.