This post was deleted by Ffortiwn

Hi Mary!

Yesterday I finally completed my diagnostic session with Judith Paton which took 2.5 hours. This was the same thing we put our daughter through, although I had unfortunately been unable to go to her appt. with her. It consisted of sitting in a little sound room with headphones, while she operated controls on the outside which generated various sounds for me, to which I was supposed to respond in various ways depending on the test.

The following list is technical and frankly I'm still getting up to speed on what it means, but maybe it will be useful to you. The detailed test summary sheet she provides in the report (which I've only seen for my daughter so far as Judith is still completing mine) includes a wide range of stuff:

Singing response PPS (Pitch Pattern Sequencing)
CES (Competing Environmental Sounds) & Sound Patterns
TCST (Time Compressed Sentence Test)
Dichotic Competing Sentences
Sound Blending & Phonemic Synthesis
Filtered Speech Words
SSW (Staggered Spondaic Word)
Speech discrimination in ipsilateral noise

What can be done really depends on what's happening in your particular situation, but for me her recommendations were focused on central hearing "loss" (not the same as what most people identify as hearing loss), abnormal auditory perception (hyperacusis), executive function (not really related to APD) and non-auditory information processing (again, not really related, but observed). Her recommendations were specific to these areas and this will always very according to what's actually going on.

There's no magic bullet, but some things can make a difference, including Auditory Integration Training (AIT), physical activities which require frequent crossing of the midline (e.g. occupational therapy) and Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP). I would caution you with NLP however, as it's still a little narrow from my point of view, but it can certainly have benefits.

You are already doing some of the things that people with APD do. Personally, I can't rely much on note-taking in "realtime" situations because I get too distracted by the process of trying to process and write and as a result end up missing even more of what's being said, but I really like the speech reading idea. Interestingly, a long time before I began to suspect any kind of physiological problem, I got into the habit of preferring subtitles even in English-language movies and such, as I found I understood what was happening much better. Repeating information back is huge, too, and getting people to put things in writing - those two things (and sheer acting!) have been my most important tools.

I feel really good, today, about having gotten through the auditory processing diagnosis. There's a fair amount of investigative work to be done in the areas of non-auditory information processing, but this is one piece of the puzzle I feel I'm finally getting a handle on.

Hope this has been helpful, and keep me posted if you decided to see Judith Paton!