Auditory discrimination is the brain’s ability to make sense of speech sounds. Children with this disorder may struggle with language development and have difficulty distinguishing similar sounds. The Wepman Auditory Discrimination Test is used to diagnose auditory processing disorders in young children.
Auditory discrimination refers to the brain’s ability to organize and make sense of the sounds of speech. Children who struggle with this may have difficulty understanding and developing language skills because their brains misinterpret the sounds of speech or process them too slowly. Often these children are unable to distinguish similar sounds or are unable to recognize speech in certain situations.
Language is made up of phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest possible sound in a word and is not necessarily related to spelling. For example, the word “night” has three phonemes: the “n” sound, the “eye” sound, and the “t” sound. When humans hear speech, their brain organizes the different sounds into meaningful chunks that can be interpreted as words. This is called phonological awareness.
People with auditory discrimination disorders may appear to be deaf or hard of hearing. They may not respond to spoken language if there is background noise or they may understand sounds incorrectly. Problems with this ability are usually related to the brain rather than the ear itself. It means that the person can hear, but hears “wrong” things. A doctor can diagnose a hearing disorder after tests show that there are no physical hearing problems.
Children with these disabilities often fall behind in school, particularly in reading and spelling, because they lack the phonological awareness necessary to relate sounds to the symbols that represent them. Sometimes, they seem to have difficulty speaking or stuttering because they can’t accurately produce speech sounds that they can’t hear properly. These children may also not be able to understand a teacher who is not in front of or addressing them directly, or they will have difficulty picking up speech sounds if there is background noise.
The Wepman Auditory Discrimination Test (WADT) is a commonly used assessment tool to diagnose auditory processing disorders in young children. In this test, a child is seated so that they cannot see the examiner. The examiner reads a series of minimal pairs, or words that differ by only one phoneme such as “bit/pit” or “ship/sheep”. Some pairs of words have no difference, and the child is given a score based on how many pairs she correctly identifies as the same or different. Other tests might involve asking a child to repeat words to an examiner or to repeat a word with a missing sound.
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