CAPD - Central Auditory Processing Disorder

Monique LaFontaine, Megan Losinski, Megan Koski, Madeline Smith,

Frances Noel, Annie Brecht, Brittany McNeil

What is Central Auditory Processing Disorder?

According to Maxine L. Young, M.S., CCC-A/SLP, FAAA, CAPD is not a specific problem or
disease; rather it is a set of problems that occur in different kinds of listening tasks. The central
auditory processes are in charge of sound localization and lateralization, auditory pattern
recognition, temporal aspects of audition, as well as the ability to identify or recognize degraded
or competing acoustic targets. Children and adults who have CAPD have difficulty using
auditory information to communicate and learn. Often children with CAPD are first diagnosed
with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or learning disabilities. With the administration of
tests, audiologists can determine if a child has CAPD versus ADHD and other learning
disabilities.

Signs of CAPD

Trouble in reading and writing

Trouble following auditory step by step directions
The child appears to be unfocused and distracted in classrooms
Says what? a lot, even when they have heard much of what was said
May seem as though they are ignoring people

CAPD and the 5 Parameters of Language:

Phonology: Having CAPD makes it very difficult to discriminate between sounds. In short, you
could have difficulty understanding spoken language in competing messages, noisy
backgrounds, or in reverberant environments; misunderstanding messages; inconsistent or
inappropriate responding; frequent requests for repetitions, saying what and huh frequently;
taking longer to respond in oral communication situations; difficulty paying attention (American
Speech-Language Hearing Association).
Morphology: Children with central auditory processing disorder have a hard time with sound
discrimination. Along with this, they struggle with auditory analysis which is identifying
phonemes or morphemes that are embedded into words. Identifying different morphemes in
words is especially important to distinguish between verb tenses and other morphological
markers that may be distorted, especially in background noise (Ferre, 2014).
Semantics: Not being able to comprehend some speech sounds or how to say a word, but they
know the meaning of the word. A child will know the meaning of the symbols by looking at them,
but they may not be able to put together the sounds or be able to come up with the word.
Syntax: In a typical auditory memory task, a child is asked to repeat sentences of both length
and complexity. If a child is experiencing any expressive language deficits then syntax and
morphology mistakes may occur. Weak attention skills can affect a childs auditory memory task.
Pragmatics: Many individuals who have been diagnosed with CAPD display behavioral
characteristics that stray from what is typical. Some individuals may express one of these
characteristics, but others can display multiple characteristics. Behavioral characteristics

associated with CAPD and pragmatic skills include but are not limited to: misunderstanding
messages; inconsistent or inappropriate responding; frequent requests for repetitions, saying
what or huh frequently; taking longer to respond in oral communication situations; difficulty
paying attention; being easily distracted; and difficulty following complex auditory directions or
commands (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association).
Discourse: Children who have CAPD will have difficulty applying rules of language to incoming
auditory messages or breaking down tasks into their constituent parts. CAPD children have
trouble with extracting key elements from a message that help with understanding. If a child
does not pick up on the key elements of a conversation it can lead to miscommunication, which
would lead to frustration and unwillingness to speak. For example, to a CAPD child, Tell me
how the chair and the couch are alike might sound like Tell me how a cow and hair are like.
You can see the similarities in the phonemes production and sounds and how a child can have
these scrambled messages.
Receptive/Expressive
Expressive language is the production of language (Miller, C., 2011). Receptive language is
the understanding of the language produced by a person (Miller, C., 2011). In a lot of cases
of CAPD, receptive language is affected more than expressive. A person who has CAPD may
experience difficulties with discrimination, pattern recognition, temporal integration and ordering,
dichotic listening, and perception of degraded stimuli (Boyle, J., 2010). They may also find
spelling and reading challenging (Boyle, J., 2010).

References
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