Imagine living in the United States your whole life, then being uprooted to a foreign country, where nobody speaks English. Now imagine that there is no way to learn this country's language. Thus, never being able to understand what is being said. This actually happens to people, without ever having to move to another country. These individuals suffer from what is known as a central auditory processing disorder.
             There are a variety of problems that have been associated with central auditory processing disorders. These disorders usually stem from some type of central lesion or improper connections between the auditory mechanism of the "temporal lobe and other motor, sensory, or integrating areas of the brain" (Mencher, Gerber, and McCombe, 1992). There will be differences in behavior as a function of the areas that are damaged, to what extent they are damaged, and what age, or stage in development, the lesion occurs.
             "For an auditory stimulus to be meaningful, there must be an intact auditory perceptual system that transmits, processes, stores, and retrieves information provided by the peripheral hearing mechanism." This system allows individuals to descriminate between sounds and identify which sounds are important and which sounds are not important. Auditory perceptual disorders involve one or more difficulties in the following areas: "interfering with complex interdependence of auditory sensitivity, auditory perception, language or speech" (Mencher, Gerber, and McCombe, 1992).
             Auditory perception involves several sub areas. "These include auditory discrimination, auditory association, auditory closure, auditory memory, auditory localization, and auditory figure-ground perception." A problem in one or more of these areas will result in some form auditory processing disorder.
             Auditory association is perhaps the most important area of auditory functioning. This is the ...