Central Auditory Processing Disorders (CAPD)

Central auditory processing disorders are deficits in processing audible signals, and these deficits are not the result of hearing loss. Many individuals with learning disabilities have CAPD, and these difficulties are often included as one of the characteristics of a language disorder. People with CAPD have difficulty:

• attending, discriminating, and identifying auditory signals,
• transforming and transmitting information through the hearing mechanism,
• filtering, sorting, and combining information at appropriate perceptual and conceptual levels,
• storing and retrieving information efficiently, restoring, organizing, and using retrieved information,
• segmenting and decoding acoustic stimuli using phonological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic knowledge, and
• attaching meaning to connected acoustic signals through use of linguistic and nonlinguistic contexts.