The struggle to survive in today's noisy classrooms is real. The child's poor performance often leads authorities to apply undue pressure on him, frequently concluding that he is lazy or of low intelligence, which is certainly not the case. The child's brain is a complex storage and retrieval organ, which mandates that information be properly received, stored, and organized in order to be retrieved for proper use. The child who processes information normally in the classroom is constantly assigning meaning to what is being said in the classroom. The brain is capable of performing these functions in millisecond as long as there is a built-in attention filtering device that assists him in processing relevant information and filtering out or eliminating that which is not. The child who has processing difficulties is not equipped with the excellent filtering capabilities of the normal processing child. His primary difficulty is that of learning through a defective auditory (hearing) channel. Unlike the normal listener, he cannot make maximum use of what he hears for academic purposes even though his hearing is normal. Something seems to intercept the information between what he hears with the normal ear and its decoding by the brain. He allows in both relevant and irrelevant information all at once. Because of poor storage and retrieval capabilities as well, this results in inadequate receptive expressive and integrative functioning on the part of the child. You may often hear him say to the teacher, "I forget" "What did you say" "Would you repeat that" "I don't understand" The Listening Child explains in layman's terms what teaches and what parents need to know out this child's difficulty.

THE LISTENING CHILD: What Can Go Wrong

What all parents and teachers need to know about the struggle to survive in today's noisy classroomsBy STEPHEN V. PRESCOD

Trafford Publishing

Copyright © 2012 Stephen V. Prescod
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4669-5163-1

Contents

Foreword..........................................................................................xiPreface...........................................................................................xiiiAbout the Author..................................................................................xviiIntroduction: How Processing Works within the Child's Classroom - An Overview.....................1Chapter 1: How We Hear............................................................................5Chapter 2: The Child's Speech and Hearing Development.............................................17Chapter 3: What to Do About a Child's Hearing Impairment..........................................35Chapter 4: The Role of the Ear in Processing......................................................43Chapter 5: The Child Who Does Not Understand......................................................53Chapter 6: The Child Who Forgets..................................................................63Chapter 7: The Child Who Is Disorganized and Confused.............................................69Chapter 8: Noise And The Mind Lost In The Classroom...............................................75Chapter 9: The Causes of Central Auditory Processing Disorders (CAPD).............................79Chapter 10: Help Is Available.....................................................................89Chapter 11: Clinical Cases........................................................................103Chapter 12: Teaching Success with Children Having CAPD............................................117Epilogue..........................................................................................137Glossary..........................................................................................141References........................................................................................147Suggested Reading.................................................................................151Self-Evaluation Quiz..............................................................................155Author Index......................................................................................161Subject Index.....................................................................................163Answers to Self-Evaluation Quiz...................................................................169Readers Comments..................................................................................173

Chapter One

How We Hear

The Development of the Ear

The human ear is fully functional by the thirty-sixth week of gestation. By this time, the cochlea (end organ of hearing) portion of the bony labyrinth situated in the anterior aspects of the inner ear has become sophisticated in distinguishing sounds. The manner in which it analyzes sounds is somewhat restricted at this stage, however, due to lack of the maturation of the central auditory nervous system. But even then, there is evidence to suggest that "selective listening" of the fetus has already begun; that is, the fetus is already processing incoming stimuli and making distinctions between, for example, the mother's voice and other voices it hears (Kolata, 1984).

It is also believed that an unborn child, still protected in its mother's womb, is capable of responding to certain sounds long before it is born. Researchers have found that if a loudspeaker is placed near the mother's womb, a startled reflex to loud sounds can be elicited from the unborn child. It is here that the environmental enrichment begins to play an indispensable role in the child's capacity for discriminative and refined listening. As a matter of fact, there is no period of parenthood with a more formative effect on development of the child's brain than the nine months of pregnancy leading to birth.

By the time, the baby is born the external ear (auricle) is formed and continues to develop until around age nine. The middle ear is also formed and effectively pneumatized (supplied with air pressure). The bones of the middle ear (ossicles) are already developed. The tympanic membrane (eardrum) changes relative position during the first two years of life while the inner ear is fully operative by the end of this two-year period. With a functional ear in place, the child is fully equipped to embark on the fascinating voyage of speech and language acquisition through the perception of sound. After birth, hearing enables a child to spin a web of language during his or her early growth and development. The development of listening skills starts at a very early age, and for a good reason, since it is by listening effectively through normal hearing processes that the child develops adequate speech and language function. That is because speech development is directly linked to hearing. A child who has difficulty hearing will naturally have difficulty acquiring appropriate speech patterns because all humans learn to speak by first hearing.

In order for the child to effectively process information he or she hears, both the receptive (decoding) and the perceptive (encoding aspects of hearing must be in perfect synchrony. Actually, the ear depends quite heavily on normal reception in hearing in order to transmit the correct signals it receives to the brain for cognitive processing.

As signals reach the brain and meaning is attributed to them, perceptive aspects of hearing or listening is at work. If anything is negatively affecting the receptive apparatus of hearing (the physical mechanism of the ear), the brain will be limited in its ability to process information it receives accurately. An infant who is developing proper listening skills, therefore, is not in a passive stage of development at all, but he or she adapts to the challenges of the listening environment and is involved in the profoundly dynamic and energetic undertaking, requiring the highest active capabilities (Friedlander, 1970).

The Hearing Mechanism

Technically, hearing actually takes place at the brain level and not at the ear level as is commonly assumed. The proper function of the ear is to change sound waves entering it into electrical signals (neural impulses) that the brain can understand. Sound waves enter the outer ear, pass through the auditory canal, and beat against a tightly stretched membrane called the eardrum (tympanic membrane) causing it to vibrate. The vibrations are picked up by three tiny bones (the tiniest bones of the body) housed in the pea-sized middle-ear cavity. These bones of the middle ear transmit the vibrations to the fluid-filled chamber of the inner ear via the stapes footplate.

Inside the fluid-filled chamber of the inner ear are thousands of specialized cells, each equipped with many microscopic hairs. These hair cells are immersed in the fluid that fills the inner ear chamber. They are set in motion whenever the fluid is disturbed. Stimulation of the hair cells by the disturbed fluid, in turn, generates electrical impulses that are sent on to the brain for decoding.

Hence, in order for a sound wave to reach the brain, the ear must first transform it into an appropriate medium that can be interpreted and understood by the brain. That appropriate medium is the neural impulse. It is the movement of...