CAPD - central auditory processing disorder

kalencap · Feb 23, 2011

For a contemporary/mainstream piece, one of my lead characters has a mild learning disability. She was held back one year in early grade school before/during diagnosis. Then, she also had trouble in high school with the foreign language requirement. Otherwise she was an A/B student and is going to community college during the course of the story.

Would CAPD be an adequate condition to yield the above or would she also likely have something additional, like a mild dyslexia or other comorbidity?

PrincessofPersia · Feb 23, 2011

I was diagnosed with CAPD a few years ago. It can cause problems in all classes, not just language. It makes it difficult to focus, difficult to understand the lessons, etc. I had a lot of trouble in school because of it. On a related note, I do have a mild dyslexia, as do the other people I know with CAPD. I don't know if they're necessarily related, but I know a few others with CAPD, and they all have it to some extent.

CAPD sucks, and it continues to cause problems. I had less trouble in college (had a 4.0) for various reasons, but it created issues at work until I started writing for a living. If you want to chat about it, I'll gladly tell you all about it. Not enough people have even heard of it. Most of my teachers just assumed I was lazy or had ADHD.

Kitti · Feb 23, 2011

My brother had a learning disability that produced almost exactly the results you're talking about - held back a grade (technically, we delayed his entrance to kindergarten, but we always joked he "failed" preschool) and had trouble with language courses in high school.

It started off as a speech disability - the county actually paid to send a speech therapist to our home every week while he was in preschool, which should tell you something about how severe it was! - and even today people comment on his accent and want to know where he's "from." It then ended up as a spelling/language disability (phonetics don't work for him b/c he doesn't process sounds/words the way everyone else does). The best example I can give of this is that it took him until he was 16 to learn to spell the word "that" - he spelled and pronounced it "thet." Foreign languages are even harder for him. By college, his only accommodation was that he was allowed to do all writing assignments on a word processor with a spell-checker. It certainly hasn't affected his non-language skills - in fact, he's currently an engineer who's been fast-tracked for promotions and is making ridiculous amounts of money.

I'm not sure exactly what he was diagnosed with - we always just called it a speech disability or a language disability.

kalencap · Feb 28, 2011

Thanks for the feedback. Looks like I'm on the right track in how I was thinking about it, including high performance otherwise.

CAPD - central auditory processing disorder

kalencap

PrincessofPersia

Kitti

procrastinatrix

kalencap