Auditory Processing Disorder

Auditory processing disorder is a condition in which a person's ears function normally but the central nervous system has difficulty processing and interpreting the sounds it receives, particularly speech, especially against background noise. People with the disorder commonly need words or sentences repeated, struggle to follow spoken instructions, have poor auditory memory, and may interpret language too literally, even though a standard hearing test shows nothing wrong. It affects both children and adults, with estimated prevalence of two to seven percent among children in the United States and United Kingdom, and males are affected about twice as often as females; one recognized subtype, King-Kopetzky syndrome, involves specific difficulty following speech in noisy environments, a failure of the usual ability to focus on one voice in a crowd.