Listen to the Auditory Processing Video

Is there any kind of exercise that can be incorporated to help with auditory processing and learning around language?

Is there something similar to what you mentioned with executive function and how that maturates over time,

Where you would expect to see a change over the developmental trajectory where that is no longer an issue?

Auditory processing is the speed at which you can incorporate and sample the external world. 

It’s something that is very highly developed early in life, that’s good news. 

Newborn babies can hear the differences in speech sounds in languages that they will not learn because nobody speaks that language in their home environment. 

This is the work of Pat Kuhl. University of Washington. So, babies are really Universal speech detectors when they’re born, they have the auditory capabilities to do that. 

And then through meaningful use, right?

Moms and dads and caregivers talking to babies up close and personal with exciting faces that move – Babies learn the sounds of the language that are used in meaningful ways. 

They start to lose the ability to discriminate those other speech sounds because they’re not as meaningful and we have to recover that ability when we learn new languages.

As well Fast ForWord helps individuals who despite, hearing English and having it used in a meaningful context, never picked up those phonetic use 

Fast ForWord is used to help people learn English as a second language for practicing English phonemes (sounds). 

Because maybe their speech sound didn’t have a high fidelity, why? Middle Ear infections.

Fast ForWord is used to help people learn English as a second language for practicing English phonemes (sounds). 

You can have a lot of fluid in the ear that sits there because the ear canals are flat and having tilted when you get – you know – as you mature as an infant. 

That fluid sits in there it’s not an infection so you don’t know it but it’s blocking speech a little bit. 

And it’s making it hard to build those meaningful connections. So, you don’t hear the differences in certain speech sounds.

They weren’t used in your language because that language wasn’t used early in your development.

Fast ForWord can help slow speech down and then as you get better and better it gets faster and faster so we get to normal speech speeds, then you can build it up.  

So Auditory comprehension is just like we showed  with the ADHD kids. 

Why are they having problems with learning to be language listeners? 

It appears that you know having a good attentional system would matter. Right? Especially for inattentive you’re not going to build speech sounds as with such high fidelity. 

What do we do? 

We give you a series of games that focus you on those speech sounds just two speech sounds at a time discriminating them, giving you a reward each time that you get it right.

It gets easier and harder and kids improve their performance pretty consistently.

About 90% of kids will improve their performance in the first week or two.

In small graduations and then that’ll continue and we see really nice results two, three years (gains) after stopping that intervention after just a few months.

That’s what most of our learning partners do,  it’s what’s stronger brains does with adults. 

We have seen that for individuals that are older adults who had good language but have a stroke.

It impacts their language area and then they’re able to rebuild back that language area by using surrounding tissue around it.