When the Brain Can't Hear: Unraveling the Mystery of Auditory Processing Disorder

by Teri James Bellis

Can follow commands and directions, even if the target object is not present • Can identify some basic shapes (e.g., circle, square) • Can identify primary colors • Can talk about concepts in the abstract and imaginary conditions (e.g., “I hope Santa brings me a scooter”) • Begins to copy patterns on a page (e.g., lines, circles) • Pays attention to a short story and may be able to answer questions about it • Hears and understands most of what is said at home and in school • Relates incidents that happened in school or at home (e.g., “Jimmy hit me”) At five years, the child • Has a vocabulary of two thousand words • Uses five-to-six-word sentences • Produces most speech sounds correctly (except for the later-developing ones) • Uses all types of sentences, including complex ones that describe cause and effect or temporal relations (e.g., “I'll get in trouble if I hit Jimmy” or “I can have a cookie after I eat my lunch”) and sentences that incorporate past, present, and future tense • Can count to ten (including counting number of objects)