Ages: 6-12
Grades: 1-7

Train the skills needed for basic sound difference awareness: dichotic listening, temporal patterning, and auditory discrimination.

The lessons, individually, and as a group, systematically build auditory awareness and attention, helping to strengthen a child's overall active listening abilities. Access to prerecorded audio files comes with the book and is used for the monaural listening, alternating monaural listening, and dichotic listening tasks. All of the remaining activities are presented by the therapist in a hierarchy of steady to variable background noise. Each activity has a goal and a performance grid for easy measurement, identification of error patterns, and documentation of progress.

The tasks are organized by three skill areas:

Dichotic Listening

Train binaural listening, monaural listening, monaural alternative listening, listening localization, and dichotic listening. Students improve the ability to listen with each ear separately, both ears together, and finally, both ears in opposition. Students use simple number repetition to learn the skill, and then expand on the skill using words and/or phrase repetition.

Temporal Patterning

Train students to differentiate between the sounds of language with activities in pitch variation, loudness variation, duration variation. Each unit begins with discriminating same or different sound patterns. Students progress to listening to and demonstrating the pitch, loudness, and duration patterns independently.

Auditory Discrimination

This section focuses on training auditory discrimination skills for speech sounds. Students discriminate vowel, consonant and compound word contrasts; and develop auditory vigilance.