Bottoms Up
Bottom-up, not Top-down
That’s how you climb up a ladder to reach the top.
You can’t magically get to the top if you are at the bottom, you need to work your way up.
No one started out by riding a unicycle or walking a tightwire. They first rolled over, crawled, pulled to stand, stood, walked… until reach their pinnacle.
Before we jump into more sophisticated functions, it is imperative we start with the basics.
Is the sound getting to the brain (for processing) in the first place?
If the answer is, “sometimes” or even “most (but not all) of it” then the auditory deprivation must be addressed before you can expect any auditory based therapy to work properly!
This is so whether the remediation provider is a reading specialist, SLP, social worker, SI provider, tutor or other specialist.
Once we have confirmed that auditory access is optimal, either by testing to confirm or addressing any auditory acuity issues found, we can then take the next step up the ladder. This is where you look at what the brain is doing with the sounds.
If you have seen the Hearing Kids assessment options, you might be wondering “which assessment is right for your child?”
The first four options are a tiered model.
If you only want to know about the status of hearing acuity, you would schedule the level 1: Auditory Acuity assessment
If you also want to know what the brain is doing with the sounds it receives, schedule the level 2: Auditory Processing assessment
If you also want to know about other physiological functions, such as visual acuity and processing, motor function, neurological maturity, etc. and want to do so in one location in one visit, you would schedule a level 3: Neurodevelopmental assessment
Only after you have looked at these would you look at higher order processes like cognitive functions, language functions, etc. These are the top tier. If this is the information you would like, you would schedule a level 4: Academic Excellence assessment
This is why there are numbers in front of these assessments.
You will notice that misophonia is a stand alone assessment of a specific disorder, hatred of sound, and thus there is no number in front of it.