Auditory Perception

Auditory perception is the brain’s ability to make sense of the things we hear around us.

Children develop auditory perceptual skills in their everyday activities while they are:

  • Getting to know the sounds they hear around them, starting with sounds in the environment: birds chirping, phone ringing, water spashing, music playing, bells chiming
  • Enjoying our voices as we talk, read, sing, rhyme and have fun with together, tuning in to the sounds, rhythm and patterns of language.

Children’s auditory and visual perception skills are the first step on their literacy journey and play an important role in promoting reading readiness.

Down the line, they give children the ‘data’ to hear and discriminate the sounds in words and syllables, enhancing their ability to learn to read.

Auditory Perception Skills

Auditory perception comprises different skills that children will use in their reading and writing in the future.

A Look Ahead

Auditory memory is our ability to store and recall what we hear.

Auditory sequencing is the ability to recognise the order of auditory stimuli. We need it for:

  • Following instructions and directions
  • Memorising rhymes and poems
  • Remembering details of a story
  • Retaining number sequences and new vocabulary, enhancing long-term memory.
Auditory sequential memory is our ability to recall what we hear or have just heard in the correct order. It enables many skills:
  • Retelling a story in the correct sequence
  • Remembering the order of words in a sentence and sounds in a word
  • Working out the pronunciation of long, unfamiliar words
  • Remembering sequence and the gist of instructions.

Auditory closure is the ability to transform a partial message into a whole message when some of the information is missing. It enhances:

  • Prediction, the ability to anticipate what the story is about
  • Understanding of stories
  • Extending the attention span, helping us focus on an activity.

Debbie de Jong, ‘Detecting Molehills before they become Mountains’, workshop for early childhood educators, Johannesburg, 2007