Valerie Dejean New York, NY phone: 1-877-4AUTKID Discussion: Sensory Integration Dysfunction, Auditory Processing Disorder, Motor Planning, Dyspraxia home

The auditory system needs a stable base provided by the vestibular systemin order to process information.

In order to develop language it is necessary to process complex informationthrough the auditory system. The auditory system is required to separatethe speech stream into meaningful single units of auditory objects.

Much as the visual system which has to reference what is sees throughthe vestibular system, the auditory system also must perform a similarreference. Without the stability from the vestibular system, it is difficultfor the auditory system to accurately interpret the sound stream well.

 Ayres in her research found a relationship between improved vestibularfunctioning and language.

She found improvement in auditory processing as well as a link betweendepressed nystagmus and expressive language. When one improved so did theother.

She felt that the therapeutic use of sensory integrative procedurescould have their greatest effect on language test scores

 Tomatis saw them much more as one system, the vestibular/cochlearsystem, and that sound influenced both the vestibule portion as well asthe cochlear.

 Tomatis sees the ear as an integrator. He saw the vestibular (balancing)and Cochlear (decoding of sound) functions of the ear joined in a singlesystem.

The vestibule analyzes larger movements, those within the body, andthe cochlea evolved as an addition to analyze smaller acoustical type movements.

 Evolution of Speech

 Influences of the Vestibular system on the Development of AuditoryProcessing

 Development of auditory processing

 The shift from vocalizations to speech was another important shiftin evolution:

 There is no single organ of speech- We turned a respiratory, digestiveorgan into an organ of speech.

 In order for speech to emerge, Firstly there needed to be thedevelopment of a high speed phonetic voco- motor control device.

_ It consisted of a new descended larynx with a

_ more supple glottis, an

_ altered sub-oral cavity and

_ tongue,

_ changed oral and

_ lower facial musculature, and

 _ corresponding new sensory and motor pathways and

 _ new cortical representation of vocal skill (see Tomatis p237-245)

 Change in the Auditory Apparatus

1) In addition to changes in the vocal apparatus there also had to bea change in the auditory apparatus with the emergence of speech.

 There needed to be a feedback system for modulating speech outputand sound modulation.

Auditory feedback is very important! Deaf humans prior to the 19th centurysimply did not learn to speak.

In other words we had to hear ourselves speak. Tomatis would suggestthat this is accomplished through (bone conduction) This is a very importantfeature of the Tomatis method.

 Disturbances or delay in auditory feedback from one's ownvoice disturbs speech greatly.

2) There was a change in auditory perception

 The decoding of pre-linguistic and early linguistic vocalizationsfrom the outside and from ourselves speaking, also placed new demands onthe auditory system by requiring it to perceive words and phrases as "auditoryobjects" or "events."

In resolving a word, the human auditory system achieves object constancy,much like vision and touch.

Words and more complex auditory events such as sentences and longerutterances take on the perceptual characteristics usually attributed tothree-dimensional visual and tactile objects.

 Most environmental sounds, such as the sound of the air-conditioningare aspects of events, rather than events in themselves, where words standout as events.

They are symbolic!

 The perceptual skills needed for breaking down the speech streaminto its constituent parts are uniquely powerful in humans.

The opening paragraph in the recent special edition of Newsweek " Thejourney toward language starts not in the nursery but in the womb, wherethe fetus is continually bathed in the sounds of its mother's voice"

This is familiar territory for anyone working with the Tomatis Method.The development of listening begins in the womb

 Tomatis talks at length about the importance of fetal listeningin the development of all the vestibular functions we have discussed sofar, much of them related to the development of praxis. He also the importanceof fetal listening on the later development of language.

 We know that the ear is functioning in utero at five months gestation.

 Babies are born imprinted to their mothers voice because theyhave been bathed in the sound of it for the last four months of gestation.

 Phonemes are the smallest units of sound from which we form words.There are 52 phonemes from which all of the worlds 6000 languages are formed.

Ultra sound studies have shown that by the seventh month in utero, thefetus responds to each of the phonemes in a word spoken by the mother witha specific muscular movement.

Also the fetus responds immediately, in other words there is no timedelay between the sensory input of the mother's voice and the motorresponse of the fetus. A very fast system - and most likely is the boneconduction system, which Tomatis has always described as having a veryrapid conduction. All this is preparing the baby for language.

 In resolving a word, the human auditory system achieves objectconstancy, much like vision and touch. The brain recognizes phonemes muchlike objects and hearing a long utterance is like hearing many objectsjuxtaposed.

The big difference in auditory processing as compared to visual processingis that is that it is done in time rather than space. So with the additionof the cochlea, we have a temporal component added to processing addinganother dimension to our perceptual reasoning.

Animals can hear as well or better than humans yet they are not ableto separate in the sound stream into recognizable objects, and thereforehear speech as a continuous complex sound, rather than identifiable auditoryobjects that then can have symbolic meaning.

 At birth the baby can discriminate between its native tongue andanother language and will respond by sucking harder for its mother tongue.

 By seven months they can recognize combined phonemes used in syllables.They will recognize the difference between tram and clam for example Thistakes incredible precision in auditory reception as well as auditory perception.It requires that the child can listen, not just hear.

 If the child, for whatever reasons, is not able to make thesefine discrimination he can go on to have difficulty with language. Certainlyfits with Tomatis' findings that we can only say what we can hear.

 Babies younger than a year can pick up on the metrical patternsof speech. Which syllables are stressed for example. At less than a yearthey hear speech , not as a continuous sound stream, but rather as a seriesof distinct but yet meaningless words.

Fine auditory discrimination is an ability that is really missing orpoorly negotiated by the autistic. It may explain why they latch onto specificletters and numbers with their visual memories, in order to have some kindof constancy.

 There also appears to be in humans a wiring for grammar. Our earspick up on the noun phrase/verb phrase relationship so that rather thanrecognizing all the possible relationships that could exist among words,our ear recognizes rules that limit these pairings to only a few.

 I have one parent of an autistic child who went on to developlanguage, who described his child as "learning to speak English as a secondlanguage". These grammatical rules that are innate to us, may not be soautomatic for the autistic child.

 As mentioned previously, developmentally the eyes depend greatlyon the vestibular system for stability for perceptual constancy and function.The visual system with support from sensory integration provided the foundationfor visual perception, including form and space perception, figure groundperception, sequencing, discrimination of size and shape, directional conceptsand discrimination.

 The visual system paired with the tactile, proprioceptive , andvestibular system, provide the foundation for eye-hand coordination andfine motor control.

 All this provides the foundation for visuographic skills whichprovide the foundation for external symbols, such as pictorial representation,letters and numbers.

THE LISTENING FUNCTION:

 _ link between the inner and the outer world

 _ It helps us to focus by cutting off irrelevant stimuli and allowsus to attend and to concentrate.

 _ It helps us to sort and organize information into meaningfulhierarchies.

 _ It allows for both inner and outer communication

 Fields of Intelligence- a hypothesis

 The way we learn is by organizing our sensory perceptions intofields of intelligence and these fields are influenced by how we perceive.

 Howard Gardner in his book "Frames of Mind" talks about his theoryof Multiple Intelligences. He suggests that there are multiple, independentintelligences, or separate fields of capacity such as linguistic, musical,mathematical, spatial, intra-and interpersonal etc.

Each of these is its' own independent grouping of potential.

Our sensory system predisposes us to lean more towards one type of intelligencethan another. We talk about visual learner, auditory learners, and kinestheticlearners.

The innate integrity of these sensory systems and the experience theyreceive will push us in one direction or another. Gardner believes thatthe fields of potential are available to all brain-minds yet the more acertain experience is repeated, the stronger will be the field effect.Therefore the strongly visual person may go on to use his visual spatialfield of intelligence, predominantly.

 In his book "Evolution's End", Joseph Chilton Pearce talksabout fields of intelligence as potential that we all taped into. He usesthe example of autistic savants to describe individual who have tappedinto one very narrow field of intelligence.

 In my experience working with autistic children with savant tendencies,for example in the visual system, such as an ability to do 100 piece puzzlefrom memory after seeing only once at age 2 1/2, will lose this capacityonce the auditory system starts to normalize and linguistic ability develops.

Pearce describes "this source as not unconscious, but the very fountainheadof consciousness..."

This source arises as a single primary frequency that holds all variablefrequencies within it. The source is universal, - our response furnishesthe needed individuality. "The cosmic soup is the same, the differencelies in the medium sampling the soup." The soup-source is the same forall, but our particular way of translating from the source, determinesour particular experience of it.

And I will add that it is our sensory receptors that are the mediumwe use to translate this cosmic soup, and it varies, therefore, from individualto individual.

In the language of quantum physics, the act of perception translatesa non-localized wave of pure potential intelligence into a particle ofour perception of reality.

Listening in this sense is our ability to use our sensory receptorsto tune into the fountainhead of consciousness. And communication is basedon the translation of this fountainhead and the hues of our communicationwill vary depending on our particular style of mediumship.

 Remember that Tomatis described the development of the CochlearIntegrator as inductive rather than evolutionary and that it was stimulatedby the language potential.

With the advent of vertical posture man became an antenna, a neurologicalradarscope able to send and receive messages.

 Language function's ultimate induction - vertical posture- provided the physical fields necessary for the analog transposition fromlanguage potential to the speech act it's self.