Auditory skills involve detecting, identifying, discriminating, and understanding sounds. Children’s auditory skills can be improved through listening to music and practicing conversation, while adults can also benefit from these exercises. Auditory Processing Disorder inhibits a person’s ability to process auditory information.
Auditory skills are those that focus on detecting and identifying sounds, discriminating sounds, and understanding sound. In basic terms, this means hearing, identifying and understanding sounds. Most auditory work is done with children, but adults can also improve their skills. You can improve your listening skills by listening to and playing music, talking and identifying different voice tones, and practicing spotting the differences between similar sounds.
Before attempting to improve a person’s listening skills, it is important to identify any problems they may have with hearing or comprehension. One example is Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), a condition that inhibits a person from processing the information they hear. A person with APD is able to detect sounds, but the ears and brain do not work together to interpret and understand the auditory signal, especially speech signals. When placed in a noisy environment, a person with APD would find it much more difficult to speak amidst other external noises than in an ideal listening environment. An audiologist can determine if a person has APD.
If a child has APD or another hearing condition, there are several things that can be done to improve their listening skills. The child must be healthy and not suffer from any other hearing impairment, or these practices may not work. Letting your child listen to a wide variety of different types of music and aiding in music appreciation is a good way to start improving listening skills. Playing and singing songs and rhymes can help a child learn to detect different sounds and coordinate recognition of different tones between the ear and the brain.
Simple conversation with a child is also very helpful in developing their listening skills. When talking, you can have the child respond in different voice intensities to ensure he or she is able to hear specific sound intensities. Having a child respond in specific voice intonations, such as the voice inflection used to ask a question, is also beneficial in improving the child’s listening skills.
It’s possible for adults to improve their listening skills too, but it can be more difficult. An adult has already established the neurological structure in the brain, so it is more difficult to change in adulthood. A child’s brain is much more “plastic” in neurological terms than an adult’s brain, which means that a child’s brain changes and adapts more easily.
An adult can participate in the same type of exercise as children, however, and gain benefits from it as well. Listening to music, especially tone recognition, can help improve your listening skills in terms of strengthening the relationship between your ear and your brain. Practicing conversations can also be beneficial if you listen carefully to how different people use vocal queues to express meaning.
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