motor skills, native language and language experience, response strategies and decision-making style, and visual acuity. It should also be noted that children under the age of seven cannot be evaluated correctly because their language and auditory processes are still developing. In addition, the presence of APD cannot be evaluated when a child's primary language is not English. Characteristics The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association state that children with (central) auditory processing disorder often: have trouble paying attention to and remembering information presented orally, and may cope better with visually acquired information have problems carrying out multi-step directions given orally; need to hear only one direction at a time have poor listening skills need more time to process information have difficulty learning a new language have difficulty understanding jokes, sarcasm, and learning songs or nursery rhymes have language difficulties (e.g., they confuse syllable sequences and have problems developing vocabulary and understanding language) have difficulty with reading, comprehension, spelling, and vocabulary APD can manifest as problems determining the direction of sounds, difficulty perceiving differences between speech sounds and the sequencing of these sounds into meaningful words, confusing similar sounds such as "hat" with "bat", "there" with "where", etc. Fewer words may be perceived than were actually said, as there can be problems detecting the gaps between words, creating the sense that someone is speaking unfamiliar or nonsense words. In addition, it is common for APD to cause speech errors involving the distortion and substitution of consonant sounds. Those with APD may have problems relating what has been said with its meaning, despite obvious recognition that a word has been said, as well as repetition of the word. Background noise, such as the sound of a radio, television or a noisy bar can make it difficult to impossible to understand speech, since spoken words may sound distorted either into irrelevant words or words that don't exist, depending on the severity of the auditory processing disorder. Using a telephone can be problematic for someone with auditory processing disorder, in comparison with someone with normal auditory processing, due to low quality audio, poor signal, intermittent sounds and the chopping of words. Many who have auditory processing disorder subconsciously develop visual coping strategies, such as lip reading, reading body language, and eye contact, to compensate for their auditory deficit, and these coping strategies are not available when using a telephone. As noted above, the status of APD as