Auditory Phonetic Subtraction

Auditory phonetic subtraction evaluates a child’s phonological awareness and auditory discrimination, particularly their ability to recognise and manipulate the sounds of language such as segmenting words into syllables and blending individual sounds to form words.

The subject is asked to analyse and manipulate auditory information by deleting or segmenting sounds and deblending the segmented sounds to assess their phonetic awareness. When combined with results from the dyseidesia / dysphonesia application this can provide valuable information about the strengths and weaknesses in auditory processing skills which can be helpful for educators, speech pathologists and tutors when working with individuals with language and literacy development.

Age matched normative data allows recommendation for referral for appropriate intervention and structured mechanisms for parents, carers, tutors and teachers to apply to help phonetic development. These referrals are pre-emptive and require simple confirmation by the optometric practitioner. Referrals can either be emailed directly to the patient’s current practitioner as provided by the primary caregiver or sent to any appropriate local practitioner already integrated in the Vision Unlocked directory.