Auditory processing disorders: can they be treated?

In recent years, parents and schools have spent millions of pounds and dollars on commercial programs that claim to treat children's developmental disorders by training their auditory processing. Here I test the truth of this claim using evidence from recent auditory training studies done with children with developmental disorders.

Six studies were published in 2007 and 2008 that trained children with developmental disorders on an auditory training program that included nonspeech sounds or simple speech sounds. The results suggest that nonspeech training and simple speech training can treat children's auditory processing disorders. However, this training has little or no effect on their reading, spoken language, or attention.

This conclusion suggests that commercial training programs could increase their efficiency (and decrease their cost) by removing redundant nonspeech and simple speech training components. The dearth of well controlled auditory training studies, paired with the misleading nature of poorly controlled studies, suggests that we need to teach parents, teachers, and the media how to separate the good training studies from the bad ones.