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New study on dichotic listening


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https://www.uib.no/en/news/36449/new-brain-test-app  Here's the app they used

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dys.1600  This is the study

Several things. One, I thought Finland was so all-fired better because of their late/delayed education, blah blah, but here apparently they're saying experts are frustrated that they wait till *11* to diagnose dyslexia. Mercy. 

Two, they only did 5 days, which is kind of impressive considering the results showed a shift from LEA to REA on a bunch of the dyslexia training group. 

Three, I don't know whether the results stuck and what effect that would have on the diagnosed APD for noise discrimination issue. Are dichotic listening and understanding in background noise the same? Maybe not. I was trying to figure out whether, in 5 days, you could undo dd's need to use the ABLE Kids filter, haha.

The app is free, so you can just play around with it.

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Dichotic listening is a very tricky thing. This is the area that my son scored the lowest. Initially if you ask him to listen with his right ear and ignore his left ear etc he would become untethered. He has a very hard time concentrating at school if kids are talking on either side of him.

The year prior to Fast Forword We tried idichotic and ILS and listening to audiobooks in the left ear only and retained reflexes and basically one hour of home therapy a day over more than an entire year. Then just to make sure their wasn't vision issues we did Vision Therapy. OK now disclosing all that when we put my son back in the CAPD testing auditory booth he had gone up one standard deviation BUT he was one year old hence he scored WORSE than the year before.  Then on a leap of faith we spent four months doing Fast Forword and went back and did Accoustic Pioneer for Dichotic listening. When we put him in the booth all scores had gone to normal on dichotic listening and hearing in sound. I think it is because there were other areas in the auditory processing system that were functioning but not perfectly and when we brought those levels up everything went to baseline.  Also I was so tempted to do FF with just the weak ear or with the fan blowing but my coach convinced me to have him really tune his system in an ideal environment and then try other methods to work on hearing in sound and dichotic listening if FF didn't get it all the way re mediated. I have stopped doing computer intervention for the last three months because now he is in the normal range and seems to continue to improve in class and in guitar. Over the summer I plan on doing a program called "sound storm" and I plan on finishing and circling back to finish interactive metronome. He is just a different kid now. He can focus and concentrate and his teachers can tell . Its about the best outcome I could have hoped for. Its not perfect we still struggle in noisy  environments and we still miss important auditory information and details but its atleast 80% better than it was. 

You could wait until your daughter gets home from college and see if you could have her demo FF. PP you really would love the webinar on why FF works from my coach. It is really cool science how they teased that out. I just can't explain it in a way to do it justice. I had always wished the FF had added a Foundations 3 that focused exclusively on Dichotic listening, hearing in sound, and more auditory memory so I built that part of the module using other programs. My son finished FF Foundations a year ago in May so it will be interesting when we put him back in the auditory booth if he maintained those gains in dichotic listening. 

 

Edited by exercise_guru
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47 minutes ago, exercise_guru said:

I think it is because there were other areas in the auditory processing system that were functioning but not perfectly and when we brought those levels up everything went to baseline.

That's a really interesting take.

Ironically, my dd had zero issues flagged clinically except for background noise. I haven't had the testing on ds to know.

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PP did they ever send you to an audiologist and have a full CAPD screening? Hearing in noise is just one variable they test. I will try to pull my sons testing. I remember dichotic listening and hearing in noise was on there along with hearing gaps in sound. That is where my son had a difficult time.  I think it was labeled temporal processing and timing in the brain. I am sure you have observed that if you give a child a set of tasks and they can quickly and efficiently do 20 with 90% efficiently that is most definitely not where the problem is. In school ideally the tasks would be at this level so that the child can just focus on learning the concept. Unfortunately if they are using all their energy to process the sound that is heard and get it through the brain it doesn't give as much bandwidth for learning the material.  Here is the challenge though say my son could not ignore his right ear and hear with his left ear. Having him practace that everyday with repetition did not remediate the dichotic weakness. The remediation my son did was at the ground up level with individual sounds and tones. We had failed at higher level sound tasks before that time but after we took it to the base level and re mediated it all started to click into place. I looked at it as adding more Auditory RAM( like a computer ) to the auditory processing part of the brain. This is what FF actually works on the very most is recognizing gaps in sound and processing the leading and lagging sounds quickly and efficiently so that it frees up processing speeds in tasks.  Later we worked on listening from the left and the right and did interactive metronome for timing in the brain but honestly even before we focused on that aspect he had come up to normal in all of the key auditory tasks in the CAPD test. I interpeted that as gaps in his brain processing skills and hopefully we filled in those gaps with remediation so he could live his life and focus on learning math instead of trying to make out what the teacher was saying and if he was getting the information clearly.  

Its not the whole pizza but its a lot of it. He still gets anxiety about assignments in school and meeting expectations. He doesn't always hear, process and remember the details in a teachers lecture and he is going to have a hard time taking notes in junior high while still absorbing all the information. Its difficult for everyone but especially for him. The difference really comes down to that now he can do it. Does he do it with grace and ease? No but he is able to do it competently which is a huge growth. 
 

I know you guys like that Able kids filter but I personally like the FM system for school and lecture. Just having a very clear sound come straight to the ear with no distortion really does help with learning, focus and attention. 

 

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1 hour ago, exercise_guru said:

I remember dichotic listening and hearing in noise was on there along with hearing gaps in sound. That is where my son had a difficult time.  I think it was labeled temporal processing and timing in the brain. I am sure you have observed that if you give a child a set of tasks and they can quickly and efficiently do 20 with 90% efficiently that is most definitely not where the problem is. In school ideally the tasks would be at this level so that the child can just focus on learning the concept.

Yes, temporal processing is about timing in the brain, and this is pretty much what it looks like in my kiddo. He has major issues with it.

1 hour ago, exercise_guru said:

I personally like the FM system for school and lecture. Just having a very clear sound come straight to the ear with no distortion really does help with learning, focus and attention. 

I have a friend whose kiddo has an FM system in school, and her main issue is also temporal processing. *She* doesn't always notice a difference in using it that is personally meaningful, but her grades do. She also has less fatigue, and she does find it easier to hear. 

My son does better in noise than he used to, but he can be very, very easily overwhelmed with noise, especially if he is required to concentrate or wants to know what's going on. He actually does well in those environments with musician's earplugs. (Think band class, places like Dave and Buster's, probably in the future--youth activities that are noisy). 

 

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P.S. TE Tuner app for iproducts is not meant to be for CAPD, but my friend noticed that you can record speech on it and play it back at a reduced speed with no distortion. She's played around with it with my son and her daughter, and they both find it comfortable to listen at 75% of the normal speed. It would be interesting if we can find a practical way to use it. 

 

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Kbutton. Fast Forword starts all the sound training with delayed slowed down sounds and slowly speeds it up as the student progresses. It also has a program in Foundations that tests memory and sounds accross different frequencies. My son excelled at the 2kHz range did average and took  quite a bit of time in the middle range 1Khz then tanked in the 500Hz range. It took him 65 training sessions to get all the ranges and he flatlined for a very long time training his brain in that range. Later when my SLP looked at that data she said it made perfect sense. this is the frequency where most noise exists ( think air conditioner etc) After training my son improved in dichotic listening and hearing in noise. I think it is because we remediated so heavily listening in those frequencies. 

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18 hours ago, exercise_guru said:

Later when my SLP looked at that data she said it made perfect sense. this is the frequency where most noise exists ( think air conditioner etc) After training my son improved in dichotic listening and hearing in noise. I think it is because we remediated so heavily listening in those frequencies. 

Thanks, that's really interesting!!!

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