Some of the common areas of difficulty for learners with auditory problems are:

• Phonological awareness:

  Individuals will often be unable to recognize and/or isolate individual sounds in a word, recognize rhyming words, or identify the syllables in a word.

• Auditory discrimination:

  Auditory discrimination is the ability to recognize differences in phonemes (sounds). This includes the ability to identify words and sounds that are similar and those that are different. For example, individuals may have difficulty distinguishing between words like "single" and "signal".

• Auditory memory:

  Auditory memory is the ability to store and recall information that was given verbally. For example, individuals may have trouble recalling information that has been read aloud.

• Auditory sequencing:

  Auditory sequencing is the ability to remember and reconstruct the order of items in a list or the order of sounds in a word or syllable. Individuals may say "ephelant" instead of "elephant".

• Auditory blending:

  Auditory blending is the process of putting together phonemes to form words. For example, the individual phonemes "c", "a", and "t" are blended to form the word, "cat."⁵

Organizational Processing Deficits

The National Center for Learning Disabilities indicates that learners with organizational processing deficits have difficulty managing time and space and generally ordering the day-to-day tasks of daily living. Individuals may have difficulty receiving, integrating, remembering and expressing information.