Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Hearing in crowds

DS5 complains that at camp he can only hears the first or last sound of the words when the counselors are giving instructions to a large group in the gym.

He was really down about it last night because apparently he keeps doing the wrong thing for whatever version of tag they are playing and feels really stupid.

His hearing screenings have been fine. We have noticed this a while and mentioned it to his pediatrician and she said he was probably just distracted. I don't think that is the problem. I have seen him intently watching a speaker and then have not really heard what was said.

We have appointments coming up with a geneticist for our connective tissue disorder and for an assessment with the Eides for gifted/dyslexia. I will certainly mention this to them but I am wondering where this problem might fit in.

Anyone have a similar problem?

You describe something indicative of auditory processing difficulties. The problem is that there isn't a normalized test for it until age 7.

Alert the counselors to his difficulties and ask the camp counselors to sit him near the front.

We had a lot of things that looked like auditory processing disorder when DS was 5 and 6. We did some related testing that would be indicative of it without doing the more direct testing he wasn't old enough for, and things looked fine. At age 7.5, with those major difficulties outgrown with with a related horde of other difficulties, we ended up with the diagnosis of apraxia, which seems neurologically related.

You should ask your doctor to refer your child for an audiology exam, which is a detailed hearing test in a soundproof booth. The hearing screens at the pediatrician can be worthless and can miss many hearing losses. My son has a 70 dB loss in one ear, which was missed 3 years in a row by the pediatrician. I finally asked for an audiology exam, where the loss was discovered. He now wears a hearing aid and he has done great!

I do. I don't think I realized until I was in my 30s that this wasn't normal. Came to a head with a colleague who would try to whisper things to me in meetings, and I couldn't follow anything she said.

With enough research and looking at stuff relating to DS, I've come to think it is a question of being heavily field dependent with over-sensitivities. I kinda see everything, hear everything. Very recently here, I realized that I am also in a small minority of readers who sub-vocalize every word. I experimented with not doing that, and realized I can't keep may place and the words kinda swim around.

I think by most measures I would also be considered dysgraphic, poor automaticity with physical learning, bad with lists and schedules; on the positive end of the scale I am pretty extreme in divergent thinking, visualization, system design, and unusual problem solving. If it is a zero-sum thing, I would not change a thing. This all maps pretty well to the Dyslexic Advantage material.

Coping mechanisms I've gravitated towards include being as close to a speaker as possible, not watching the speaker (full visual field + full sound is extra noisy), doodling.

My DD complains of this and we also notice in it in her, though it isn't a HUGE deal. She was tested comprehensively for hearing and auditory processing at a large university and came up clean as a whistle. I don't know what her deal is.

I do think she has SPD. She is sensitive to noise in general. This may be more a case of being overwhelmed in noisy settings. Her teacher last year used to play classical music while they did math, which she HATED. She needs relative quiet to work. (I mean, is this so unusual? So do I.)

Also, as with Zen Scanner (this is not the first time Zen Scanner and my DD have seemed to have somewhat similar brains), DD sometimes needs to look elsewhere, fidget, or doodle to process spoken words well. However, DD is not at all dyslexic or dysgraphic...

I think I have that problem, myself. I don't have any hearing problems when tested, but if I can't see the mouth moving, I have a hard time making out what people are saying when it's noisy. I don't lipread, but somehow it helps to be able to see someone talking as well as hear them.

Ultramarina, I had your DD's problem in algebra in high school -- the teacher played the radio and it drove me nuts. Of course, I'd go home and blast the stereo while I did my homework -- but I think it was something about unfamiliar music (trying to listen to hear the words, unconsciously) and talking on the radio, that just didn't work for me. Music I already knew would just go right through without causing a disruption in my brain.

I use music as a screening tool. I definitely have auditory SPD of some kind, and everyone else in my household does, too. My DH is like ZS and needs relative quiet, and my DD and I need white-noise of some kind.

His vision and hearing do seem unusually perceptive.

Examples:

He can hear the slight hum of some electronics from another room when the power is on but they are not actually playing.

He can sometimes hear his clothing move while he walks.

He can spot small camouflaged wildlife like crazy. His teacher has noticed this as did a naturalist at a local museum.

He can beat anyone I know on those "spot the difference" photos.

I am SO hoping all of this gets figured out over the next few months.

KJP, my dd who had SPD had extremely sensitive hearing - we used to not be able to vacuum while she was in the house even if she was in a room with door closed on the other side of the house - the noise would be so loud (to her) she'd be in pain. She would complain about someone watching the tv with volume turned down low on the other side of the house. She also couldn't handle going to movies when she was little, or into large crowded noisy rooms. She had a sensory OT eval when she was 5, the spring before she went to kindergarten, and the OT recommended listening therapy - she had listening therapy for almost a full year (weekly visits with OT, listened to the program at home 20 minutes two times a day for the other days). This was all going on while she was in kindergarten. We noticed a huge difference at first when she wore the earphones - she could sit still and draw or write etc for the entire time she was wearing the phones, but prior to that she'd been really fidgety and moved around constantly. At the beginning of kindergarten, when she was just starting the program, she would complain all the time that she couldn't hear the teachers because "the other kids were too loud". When we observed and from what the teacher told us, it wasn't that the other kids were talking, but what was happening was she was hearing all these tiny background classroom noises like a pencil tap or a paper moving etc as loud or louder than the teacher's voice. As the year went by and she continued with her listening therapy, the challenge with being distracted by background noise disappeared.

FWIW, prior to the listening therapy she was seen by an audiologist and had a in-depth hearing eval (sound booth etc, looking for signs of CAPD). Hearing issues were ruled out. For dd, it was all about sensory processing.

I hope you're able to figure it out - it must be very frustrating for your ds.

Best wishes,

polarbear

My DS9 with SPD has this problem. We did a neuropsych eval this summer and while I don't have the results yet, this is one thing she told me after one of the sessions. He has difficulty concentrating on what someone is saying when there is a lot of noise (like an elementary school classroom). I think it is like what Zen said, he is so sensitive to everything that sometimes he can't block out the unimportant in order to focus on the important. His teacher's complain that he doesn't listen to directions, but I think I'm starting to get a better picture of what's going on (and why he had major meltdowns in first grade when his class was really loud and out of control much of the time).
FWIW, I had his hearing tested back then by an audiologist and it came back fine. I thought I was wrong, but now I think those tests just don't capture the phenomenon we are talking about here.

The neuropsych gave recommendations for school: seat him at the front near where the teacher speaks and to physically touch him on the shoulder every once in a while to "bring him back" if it seems like he has lost focus.

Perhaps, your son could be seated closer to the counselors at camp? Or mention the problem to one of them and ask them to be sure to check in with him that he heard?

Wow, this is so helpful to me to hear that this is an SPD issue for other kids. That is what I suspected in my DD, but I was just going on instinct. She seems to be maturing out of it somewhat, but it's good to know that that could be what is going on with her here. (She used to look very SPD and a lot of it has gone away with time, but not all.)

Today was his last day and I let him stay home. Usually I would make him finish out the week but he's had a heck of a month (4 different all day M-F camps, cross country roadtrip and hospitalized grandfather). Also, is the last day of summer for him to have one on one time with mom.

We did talk about how next summer he could let them know and see if one of the counselors can explain stuff like that one on one before the game starts.

I think this is typical of SPD - children learn to cope with the SPD as they mature so a lot of the extreme SPD beahvior you notice when your children are small seems to disappear as they get older. With our dd, I think it's a combination of outgrowing some of it, developing the skills to enable her to better cope with parts of it, and also simply starting to hide some of it or ignore some of it. For instance, she used to scream about smells that bugged her and she would smell anything and everything to get a sense of what it was etc. She doesn't smell things (at least not obviously anymore), and she doesn't usually comment about smells and never screams about them anymore. OTOH, she will now and then comment on a "smell" that no one else in our family can smell at all... so I am sure her sense of smell is still unusually keen.

polarbear

DD can tell what I am cooking the second she steps in the door. It's amazing!

I was ready to ask DD's teacher this year (who is really nice) if she would alert DD to fire drills in advance. I considered it last year, but that teacher was so unsympathetic that I just didn't. But they have already had a drill this year, so DD and I talked about it and she said I didn't need to do this. "It doesn't bother me as much anymore." (The noise used to jangle her for hours, it seemed.)

I'm a fan of white noise -- I turn the fan on in the bedroom so I can get to sleep, or sleep later in the mornings after the kids are up on weekends. And I like white-noise kinds of music and sounds, like instrumentals and rain and stuff, when I'm writing -- but anything with words disrupts the thinking process and I can't write then.

KJP, I hear those electronics noises, too -- and I'm always the one who can hear when a TV is making a different noise because it's getting close to dying. Everyone else thinks I'm crazy. And yet I struggle to make out what people are saying on TV if I can't see their faces. Especially British accents -- I had to give up on Sherlock because I couldn't understand a word they were saying.

DS sees an OT for sensory issues among other things. He has been in OT for about 18 months and has showed a lot of improvement. His therapy has been focused mostly on improving muscle tone, coordination and balance. Whether it is therapy or just age, a year ago an hour in that environment wouldn't have been tolerated much less nearly three weeks with seven hours every day.

I looked into it today and it looks like the children's hospital where he is going to see the geneticist has a pediatric hearing center.

Would a pediatric audiologist be the right person to see?

I should add to my above post - my inclination is to check with the experts of course but then probably wait a few years to see if there is improvement. If not, at least at that point testing would be more accurate. In the meantime, just letting teachers and counselors know that he doesn't hear well in crowds would probably be enough.

This is an interesting post. I went through a severe migraine disorder for 2 years that I am past now, but during that time, I had difficulty filtering sounds. I could hear every conversation in a room as if it were in front of me. If something is temporary it might be migraine. I also have dealt with where I can hear someone talk without a problem but I cannot understand anything that they are saying.

In general, I hate jogging, even though I have always been an athlete, because the sound of my feet hitting the pavement in that rhythm and my clothes moving, while I am not focused on something else drives me batty. Also, I too, have to generally be doing something else in order to pay attention to what someone is saying. If I am looking straight at someone, you can bet that I am totally zoned out.

My husband is an OT and he makes jokes about my sensory issues. I absolutely hate fans and anything that involves both loud music and flashing lights.

KJ, hopefully the therapy will not result in him losing the good abilities he has.

So I looked back at his medical records...

I first brought up problems with his hearing in Feb. 2012.

He was screened six months later. Here are the results:

Left:
500hz: 20db
1000hz: 5db
2000hz: 5db
4000hz: 5db

Right:
500hz: 20db
1000hz: 15db
2000hz: 5db
4000hz: 5db

This was considered a pass but I am learning (by lots of googling) that maybe this was a borderline pass and maybe indicative of some hearing loss.

He has several risk factors for hearing problems - preterm, NICU, jaundice

Anyone more familiar with these test?

His teacher also mentioned last year that he had trouble distinguishing between similar sounds. He makes similar errors when speaking.

Your DS sounds similar mine.

He's always had this unusually strong visual/spatial aptitude (advanced mazes, puzzles, etc) and he sees things that other people miss. He was also screened for auditory processing (at age 8) and he does have an issue with binaural integration/separation (his brain prefers his right ear, even though the hearing in both ears tests as normal).

I've always compensated by slowing down and over articulating my speech, which seems to have helped, although he did for awhile mimic my speaking style and sounded somewhat babyish (he's outgrown this). His classroom teacher sat him to the left of the class at the front so that his right ear was positioned to hear her while teaching. The school was able to get him an "easy listening" system (like a simpler version of an FM system) which helped a bit, although he didn't always want to wear the headphones.

That was last year... this year? Who knows. My kids find out who their teachers will be today, so I'm anxious to find out who I'll be working with...

It's only a "barely pass" on the 500Hz level, because 20db at any normally audible frequency is considered normal.

At the low end of decibels, the results are easily influenced by wax or other objects in the ear. I failed a hearing test once because a bit of cotton swab fuzz had gotten wedged up against one eardrum.

My youngest child produces silly amounts of wax and as Dude says it effects her hearing. I think she was 12-14 months when I became worried about her declining diction. She's been having the ENT dig massive hunks of wax out of her ears every time her speech starts to devolve since that time.

My eldest has CAPD, so I guess I was hyper vigilant about early hearing issues, though my eldest had no signs, not a single ear infection and has exceptional hearing, especially in lower registers (which may be the cause of her CAPD, she hears more than other people, especially low rumble, and has trouble picking what to listen to).