Hearing (Phonological) Problems and Dyslexia: Understanding the Connection.
In Britain, over eight million people, including more than 25,000 children, experience some form of hearing loss. While deafness is commonly associated with ageing, many individuals are born profoundly deaf or acquire hearing impairments due to illness. Additionally, approximately one million children between the ages of 0 and 8 suffer from temporary hearing loss due to a condition known as ‘glue ear.’
Extensive research conducted over the past few decades has led to the widely accepted understanding that some individuals with dyslexia also face difficulties related to hearing (auditory) processing. Interestingly, some people who pass a standard hearing test with no apparent issues may still struggle with auditory challenges that affect their ability to process sounds effectively.
Auditory Perception and Dyslexia
It can be perplexing when a child passes a hearing test yet continues to exhibit signs of hearing difficulties. One possible explanation is auditory hypersensitivity—some individuals may be overly sensitive to specific sounds or frequencies. Others may experience asymmetrical hearing, where sound perception differs between the right and left ear. These challenges can significantly impact sound discrimination, which is crucial for language development and reading skills—areas where people with dyslexia often struggle.
Beyond the ear’s mechanics, the brain plays a crucial role in auditory processing. Many therapeutic interventions focus on retraining the brain to interpret better and organise auditory input. Addressing these processing issues through specialised therapies can significantly improve learning and communication.
Auditory Training and Therapy
Various therapies exist to help individuals with auditory difficulties. Before pursuing any intervention, an audiologist should thoroughly assess the individual’s auditory system to determine whether a specific treatment approach may benefit them.
Despite sounding complex, auditory training involves testing the ears and training them to listen and respond appropriately. This type of therapy can last from a few months to several years, but if successful, it can significantly enhance auditory processing and overall communication skills.
Glue Ear and Its Impact on Dyslexia
Understanding Glue Ear
Glue ear is a common condition in childhood, often occurring when the eustachian tube becomes blocked—sometimes due to enlarged adenoids. This blockage prevents air from reaching the middle ear, leading to fluid buildup. Initially, the eardrum may appear darker, and over time, the fluid thickens, developing a glue-like consistency.
One of the primary signs of glue ear in young children is delayed speech development. This condition may go unnoticed until routine hearing tests at six months or before a child starts school. If left untreated, glue ear can cause persistent speech, reading, and writing difficulties, potentially exacerbating dyslexic tendencies.
Diagnosis and Treatment
Fortunately, glue ear often resolves itself without intervention. However, in more severe cases, medical treatment may be required. A common approach involves creating a small opening in the eardrum under anaesthesia to insert a tiny tube (grommet). This procedure typically provides immediate hearing improvement.
Historically, children required surgery to insert grommets. Still, advancements now allow using a V-tube device to place a grommet in seconds without an operation. Future developments may enable general practitioners to perform this procedure outside of a hospital setting, making treatment more accessible.
Seeking Further Assessment
Additional specialised hearing tests may be necessary if a child continues to exhibit auditory challenges despite medical intervention. Some assessments focus on high-frequency sound perception, helping to identify subtle auditory processing issues. Parents and caregivers who suspect ongoing hearing difficulties should consult a doctor or health professional for further evaluation and possible referral to specialists.
Conclusion
Hearing challenges can significantly impact language development and learning, whether due to conditions like ‘glue ear’ or underlying auditory processing difficulties. Given the strong connection between auditory perception and dyslexia, addressing these issues early through appropriate medical and therapeutic interventions can lead to significant improvements. Raising awareness of these interrelated challenges ensures that children receive the support they need to thrive academically and socially.
17 March 2025
A.R.R.O.W & Dyslexia
by Dr Colin Lane
The Improvement of Listening, Reading and Spelling Skills of Dyslexic Students
Hearing
Hearing is a physiological state, which depends upon an intact outer, middle and inner ear hearing system. In the outer ear system, the sound is carried through the ear canal to the eardrum. At the eardrum, the sound is conducted into the middle ear system through a series of bones. These, in turn, send sound into the inner ear system. In the inner ear system, the sound is changed into electrical impulses before being sent to the brain via the auditory nerve. Any defect in either of the outer, middle or inner ear systems can cause a hearing loss. This hearing loss can, in turn, cause problems in speech, communication and literacy skills. Most deaf school leavers have experienced severe problems in reading and spelling despite having a normal range of intelligence.
Fortunately, a greater proportion of dyslexic children has an intact hearing system. However, despite having normal hearing, they usually have other auditory problems.
Listening
Listening, here defined as auditory attention, does not require a fully intact hearing system. Listening is an acquired skill. Listening varies from child to child among the normally hearing or hearing impaired populations.
There is strong evidence to show that there are normally hearing students of all ages and abilities who experience severe problems when listening to speech in background noise. These auditory problems have the most significant effect on their progress in terms of reading and spelling.
Auditory Attention Span
Listening involves focusing on and maintaining auditory attention. The listener needs to select the spoken word and then reject any relevant input such as background noise. Some mature motivated students maintain auditory attention for 45 minutes or more. In younger or easily distracted children, such attention may only be a few minutes. There are many cases of students with reading and spelling difficulties experiencing severe auditory attention problems. Auditory attention is trainable.
The Arrow Technique
Young students learn better by listening to themselves and indeed prefer to listen to their own voices. The student’s own voice heard within the head, is that which is universally applied in memory tasks and for internal thought. A technique called A.R.R.O.W. has been developed from the use of the self-voice. A.R.R.O.W. is an acronym for Aural – Read – Respond – Oral – Write. The student listens to the tutor’s voice through headsets and repeats it. At the same time, the student reads the text. The recording of the students self-voice then forms the basis of the Arrow work. This work requires the student to take down dictation from passages of information, and precision spellings. The student checks the accuracy of the work undertaken. A.R.R.O.W. programme’s are centred upon National Curriculum requirements. When used in further education colleges, vocational and other curriculum work may be used.
Results
The ARROW self voice technique can make a swift and dramatic impact on the listening, auditory processing and literacy skills of dyslexic students. Trained ARROW teachers and assistants are achieving up to eight months of progress in reading and/or seven months progress in spelling within a total of two hours one to one tuition time. This tuition time can be split up as necessary. The students are required to work a further four hours, a little at a time, on their own, in order to complete a programme. Some teachers are reporting up to two or even three years of progress following a series of two or three short interventions.
Students quickly learn how to attend more effectively. Some students with attention problems can improve their listening in background noise up to and beyond the level of an adequate listener.
In addition to the literacy and listening improvements other learning skills improve. Teachers report that student’s self-esteem rises as does handwriting and their general classroom performance.
differentiation, short term memory and the tutor
The Arrow programme recognises the strong need for all reading and spelling work to be set within the student’s ability level. Differentiation is, therefore, a cornerstone of the system together with the importance of the working short-term memory. Precision spellings are set within word families, frequently used words and similar-sounding words having a dissimilar letter pattern. The Arrow tutor quickly establishes a starting level with a student on the programme. The tutor next helps the student make as near a perfect recording of the self-voice as possible whilst ensuring that the student remains on task.
Flexibility of Training
The Arrow system is so flexible that Arrow training for students can be given within a week or spread over several weeks according to timetable/curriculum requirements. Students can work on our own or within groups.
Current and Future Technology Requirements
A special audiocassette recorder is used to make recordings of the student’s voice. An ordinary cassette player can be used when the student is listening to the tape. The Arrow approach is now being used on CD-ROM.
Arrow Centres
Arrow help is available for students through mainstream education. Where students cannot access these facilities Arrow provision also operates within specialist Arrow Centres. These Centres can be at schools or colleges already using Arrow but offers help to students from outside their own particular school or college. In addition, tutors operating from selected sites or operating from their own premises can provide help. Students attending Arrow Centres usually attend on a short once-weekly lesson for five or six weeks or undertake distance learning programme’s.
Arrow Tutor Training
Arrow Tutor training programme’s operate on a regional basis. The Arrow programme has received national accreditation as an Advanced BTEC Award for Arrow Tutors. The training programme is essentially practical. During the course, trainee tutors attend a regionally based Arrow Centre for four separate days. The remaining part of the programme requires a tutor to use the technique with their students. A report is submitted at the end of the third term of the programme. The course is open to professionals in the field of education and health. In some cases, selected parents have been trained to work with their children.
Training courses are available for children and teachers.
For further information, please contact ARROW at – Self-Voice.
Music Therapy is used within a therapeutic relationship to address people’s physical, emotional, cognitive, and social needs.
Music Therapy is carried out by music therapists, who use their training as musicians, clinicians, and researchers to effect changes in, amongst others, cognitive, physical and emotional skills. The Music Therapists assess the strengths and needs of each client and then indicate the type of treatment required.
This could involve: singing; creating; dancing to; and listening to music.
Music therapy helps people develop better concentration and awareness of decreased sound sensitivity.
Music Therapy can help people with dyslexia, ADHD and other learning difficulties by helping with auditory discrimination of sounds (a significant problem for dyslexic people) and helping with organizational skills. It also allows clients to stay calm and increases creativity. Clients who have used this therapy say they have an: improved attention span, better memory skills and increased self-esteem.
Clients develop a greater sense of awareness and confidence, which leads to improved self-esteem.
British Deaf Association
Contains the latest information about the deaf association and the British Sign Language.
Website:www.bda.org.uk
National Deaf Children’s Society
Helps families, parents and carers to maximise their skills and abilities.
Website:www.ndcs.org.uk
RNID (Royal National Institute for Deaf People)
Leading charity campaigns for improvements in facilities and services.The RNID are operating a campaign allowing people to take an instant telephone hearing check. The whole check will take you less than 5 minutes. Visit their website for further details.Website:www.ndcs.org.uk
Success for Kids with Hearing Loss
If any of your kids also have any hearing issues there are some great resources at:
Website: Success for Kids with Hearing Loss
In 1982, a French Ear, Nose and Throat specialist, Dr Alfred Tomatis, invented an ‘Electronic Ear’ device.
Tomatis used this device to normalize hearing and the way the brain processes information. He believed that the root cause of many learning difficulties was due to the ‘way we listen’ and if we did not ‘listen’ properly, we could have impaired hearing. This, in turn, could lead to dyslexia. He went on to develop a highly effective technique to remedy this problem.
Tomatis was not only a leader in his field; he was also one of the first audiologists that believed that dyslexia was related more to the ear than the eye (as is the belief in other medical areas).
The method uses specially modified auditory feedback in a broad range of frequencies; this approach is beneficial for children with auditory processing problems. (A lot of people with dyslexia have auditory processing problems.)
These treatments aim was to re-pattern a child’s hearing range.
Auditory Integration Training was developed in 1982 by a French ENT (Ear, Nose and Throat) specialist, Dr Guy Berard, to normalize hearing and how the brain processes information. Berard realised that many people with acute hearing problems often had learning disorders such as dyslexia, ADHD and other learning difficulties.
Some people have different hearing levels in each ear. Others can have hearing problems: hypersensitivity to certain frequencies; when right and left ears perceive sounds in different ways, this can lead to poor sound discrimination – leading to learning difficulties.
AIT helps people with dyslexia and other learning difficulties by developing better concentration and decreased sound sensitivity. Berard’s book: ‘Hearing Equals Behaviour’, (ISBN: 0-87983-600-8) published by Keats has some good case samples.
Some students with ADHD have also reported less impulsivity and restlessness and a reduction in distractibility.
The Lexiphone method was developed in the mid-’70s by a psychiatrist and Professor of Psychology, Dr Isi Beller, who has spent more than 25 years researching dyslexia.
An audio-feedback uses artificial means to re-educate automatic language processing without the awareness of the student.
The Lexiphone method retrains auditory attention and speech awareness during selected listening, speaking, reading, and writing activities.
The Lexiphone method is said to help people with auditory problems and dyslexia.
For centuries, musicians have used a metronome to help them keep time. Recently, it has hit the headlines as work is being carried out with clients with dyslexia and ADHD.
Interactive Metronome apparently has undergone scientific trials and, is said, amongst other things, shown improvement in Attention and Concentration, Motor Control and Coordination.
The Metronome helps train the brain to plan, sequence and process information more effectively through the repetition of interactive exercises. The Interactive Metronome program involves repeated hand, toe, and heel exercises.
Interactive Metronome therapy is said to help people with many disorders, including Autism Disorder, ADHD, dyslexia and many others.
SAMONAS is an acronym of ‘Spectral Activated Music of Optimal Natural Structure’. It is another form of electronically tailored music therapy developed in Germany by a physicist, Ingo Steinbach.
The system is said to train the auditory system to process the full range of sound without distortion, hypersensitivity, or frequency loss.
SAMONAS is said to help people with hearing loss, improved speech, hypersensitive hearing, auditory processing problems, ADHD, dyslexia and other difficulties. Some therapists claim it can also help with auditory discrimination problems.
“A Guide to Overcoming Addiction for the Sensory Impaired”
I have just completed an interesting article about Overcoming Addiction for the Sensory Impaired. This collates many of my findings over the years.
The title of this article is “A Guide to Overcoming Addiction for the Sensory Impaired”, and it covers:
• The role of childhood experiences
• Additional risk factors for the sensory impaired
• Substance use disorders & the disabled
• Treatment considerations for the deaf
• Treatment considerations for the blind
• Components of treatment
• How Treatment is Tailored to the Needs of the Sensory Impaired
• Where to Find help
You can find my article here:
Read this useful guide to addiction and the sensory impaired by Ollie Clark.
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