AUDITORY PROCESSING ISSUES HOW TO

Explain how to assess and manage common auditory difficulties faced by children with ASD and normal hearing sensitivity.Describe strategies to obtain a valid hearing test from children with ASD.After reading her excellent 20Q article, you just might want to respond to her help-wanted request.īrowse the complete collection of 20Q with Gus Mueller CEU articles at 20Q: Auditory Issues in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Audiologists Wanted Learning OutcomesĪfter reading this article, professionals will be able to: She tells me that this topic is of particular interest to her because early in her career, she worked as an educational audiologist and saw, first hand, the difficulties that children with ASD face when trying to learn and filter out unwanted auditory information in noisy school environments. Notice that “Audiologists Wanted” is part of Erin’s title. She has been honored with the UNT Office of Research and Innovation Teacher Scholar Award, and the Cheryl Deconde Johnson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Educational and Pediatric Audiology. Schafer is the Editor of Audiology Today for the American Academy of Audiology and past President and Journal Editor for the Educational Audiology Association. You are probably familiar with her work, as she has been awarded numerous grants, is a frequent speaker at national conferences, and has over 100 publications, including four textbooks.ĭr. Schafer, PhD, is Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in Audiology at the University of North Texas, where she has been a faculty member since 2005. That’s what we’re doing this month here at 20Q.Įrin C. This often moves us out of our “diagnostic comfort zone,” and it’s helpful to get a little advice from an expert.

In these cases, modified test procedures may be necessary, or we may need to include other tests, such as ABR, or those of auditory processing. Such is the case with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which has become more prevalent in recent years. Our task becomes more difficult when the hearing problem goes beyond what you see with basic testing, and when it co-exists with a more general disability. And then, when you add tympanometry, acoustic reflexes and OAEs, you have a test battery that will identify the primary pathology of most of your patients-at least to the extent that appropriate treatment can be determined.īut it’s not always that simple. And of course, the basic comparison of air conduction and bone conduction thresholds provided another level of preciseness. This probably started with discovering that several pathologies have a signature audiogram configuration. For many of us, what first sparked our interest in the profession of audiology was the concept of differential diagnoses.

Auditory processing issues