if you have adhd and know sign language do you sometimes fail to process signs until they're halfway through re-signing them for you
so really it's less of an auditory processing issue and more of a language processing one, huh?
#auditory processing disorder exists as a thing distinct from adhd obviously#but that's more of a specifically hoh thing#as opposed to the adhd thing where sometimes your brain does not convert the sounds and symbols into concepts#actually is it common outside internet adhd/autism communities to refer to this issue as an auditory processing one#anyway i'm going to start calling it a language processing issue because like#it's way more accurate and descriptive
okay so so so: I have hearing loss and APD from a childhood illness AND I have ADHD traits so I maybe fit in an interesting intersection of the two communities? I will say it wasn’t until I started following a lot of ADHD people on tumblr that I saw “auditory processing issues” being used to describe ADHD language conversion difficulties; I will also say that coming from a real-life community of people with APD and seeing people talk about auditory processing issues, I did have a lot of “ooh same hat!” moments before I realized that they were actually different things?
So the way APD was explained to me when I was diagnosed (note: this was when I was seven, it is almost certainly simplified) is that it is like dyslexia for sounds. When I was very tiny and the parts of my brain that interpret sounds were in development, I got sick and lost the ability to hear. When I later regained most of that ability, I had missed a lot of the window where I should have learned how to recognize and interpret sounds. So what ends up happening is whenever I hear something, there’s a bit of a buffer period bc my brain has to manually figure out what it’s getting, and a lot of the time it’s not quite accurate. Note that this is not limited to just language; I don’t go to concerts indoors bc something about the sound system and the reverb combine to be just a huge wall of sound for me, and I have to think about it even to get a pitch out of the noise, even though that’s not an issue in a small room with no speakers.
The ADHD thing you’re describing seems a bit different to me? Specifically the use of the word “concepts.” I do struggle with understanding the words people use, but not as much with understanding what they mean once I figure out what they’re saying, does that make sense? It’s like I’ve been handed a sentence where every word’s got its letters jumbled, and you’ve been handed a sentence where all the words are out of order. That’s simplifying it, obviously, but does that track or am I misinterpreting?
I like your term “language processing issues” rather than ‘auditory processing’ for a couple reasons. Firstly, as was the point of this post, a lot of folks with ADHD have issues with immediately interpreting information no matter how it is conveyed, so saying ‘auditory’ doesn’t fully describe the phenomenon. Secondly, it feels more accurate, since the ADHD version doesn’t seem to deal with the same auditory processing brain functions that APD (or at least my version) has, so ‘auditory processing’ is a misnomer in that way too. And lastly, as I mentioned earlier, it’s kind of confusing! I’m guessing a fair amount of people of both sides will see people in the other group talking about their auditory processing issues and will assume that they’re the same as the ones they have. (This is speaking from experience. It wasn’t until this post that I really understood how the two were different.)
I hope any of that is helpful?
this is extremely interesting, thank you!!
i have heard adhd language processing issues described as ‘everyone is charlie brown’s teacher now’
which is to say, i can hear them! i can hear the words just fine! but... they might as well be speaking a foreign language, or wah-wah-wah, because my brain is not translating whatever they are saying into english, even though they are already speaking english. they are just sounds that are happening, that i am aware are supposed to be words, but my brain isn’t doing The Words Thing. someone says “👀🐄🥛🍼❓” and i say “huh?” but then a second later my brain is like “they can’t find the milk” except for the times when it’s like “i’m absolutely certain they’re looking for milfs, good luck”
it is very similar to translation, actually, in that you might read a sentence in french and not understand it until you have mentally converted the words to english a moment later. except that it’s all the same language and my brain is just confused.
it seems like what’s happening is that even though someone is speaking to me and i’m supposed to be processing it as such, what happening is instead i’m filtering it out as background noise. adhd is in a lot of ways a filtering problem, so while the human brain should be able to recognize ‘relevant stimuli’ and ‘irrelevant stimuli’ and filter them accordingly, Filter Machine Broke.
this can also apply to the written word, in that if i’m having focus issues i can reread a sentence multiple times and just not understand what in the hell it’s saying. the meaning of the sentence just isn’t making it through at all. i know all these words and what the words mean but this sentence is just a list of words signifying nothing.
which is part of why i thought of signing, because it seemed to me that for people with adhd signing would just change the problem into “i did not process their signs as language” as opposed to “i did not process their spoken words as language”
See, for me (ADHD, no physical issue hearing to my knowledge), I'm kind of baffled because I'm looking at BOTH of these descriptions and going "but... yeah, it's that?"
Like, I hear words but can't make them make sense but it's not just "they're clearly saying real words but what do they MEAN" but just sounds that... don't really make sense? And god help me if there's more going on - if someone's talking to me in a loud room, there is next to no chance I'll be able to pick their sounds out from all the other mush of sounds. Indoor concerts are hell - anything indoor and crowded is hell, it's all just one huge mass of noise.
The concepts themselves are generally not the issue for me - it's literally the sounds of it. I think it's possible that there are two distinct types of processing disorders/difficulties that are being conflated because of a lack of precise language around them? One of them being language itself and the other actually being just getting the sounds to make words.
huh okay this is interesting! I definitely experience the ‘charlie brown’s teacher’ thing where someone was talking and I just... did not actually process any of it as language. It’s why I can’t listen to podcasts if I’m doing any other task that has words involved — my brain can only process one word-based input at a time. sometimes my own thoughts are that input and when I tune back in I’ve missed a whole chunk of whatever was going on in my ears.
this can happen even where there‘s no other environmental noise, but it definitely gets a lot worse when there is, or when there’s multiple people talking and I can’t see their mouths, or when the background noise is varied enough that it breaks my filters.
Once I was set up at an artist alley where 2 other tables were playing loud music roughly equidistant from me, and it was incredibly distressing in a way i had never experienced before — really almost a physical sensation even though it was all my brain freaking out at its inability to filter. I ended up asking the organizers to get them to take turns playing music, because otherwise I would have had to leave.
