2:46pm June 27, 2014

➸ Receptive language problems vs. auditory processing problems.

youneedacat:

I see people confuse these things all the time, so this is just an attempt to differentiate them. Because I have them both. And they’re worlds apart, completely different, even though sometimes they have similar results ona superficial level.

Auditory Processing Disorders

So a lot of people…

Thanks for writing this out. It didn’t even occur to me that anyone might confuse auditory processing with receptive language issues, but that would certainly explain a lot of random weirdness I’ve gotten from people regarding such things.

E.g., I’ve been in a ton of situations where like…someone will suddenly seem very surprised that I don’t understand something, because I’ve (up until that point) been able to say stuff about a subject indicating I know the relevant vocabulary, etc.

Mind you, I do have auditory processing problems too, but like in your case, they’re not as severe as the receptive language issues.

My auditory processing issues come into play much more when I am expected to pick a single voice out of a crowd or understand speech on a conference call. Or when I am watching television (I prefer to always have subtitles on because otherwise I “lose” big chunks of speech in the presence of any background noise whatsoever).

But all of that is totally separate from the matter of whether my brain is going to process language as language in the first place, which varies day to day and hour to hour depending on what is going on. Or whether, once I’ve determined language is happening, I will even get to the point of comprehending it in context.

Side note: I am actually perseverating on accents right now (particularly UK regional accents). I’ve been following along with a few tutorial videos on YouTube and it’s so obviously a very different thing for me to hear and imitate sound-patterns than it is to even know what I’ve just said.

Yeah there’s a lot of people who have both but one is more severe than the other. I think when I was diagnosed with CAPD, the diagnostician didn’t think of that, so she sort of “folded in” all my receptive language issues as “auditory processing issues” and diagnosed my CAPD as much more severe than it actually was.

Notes: