APA Dictionary of Psychology

an impaired ability to decode acoustic messages into meaningful information and to discriminate speech, despite only minor changes in auditory sensitivity to sound. In adults, CAPD is typically associated with brain damage caused by stroke, lesions, and neurodegenerative diseases, such as multiple sclerosis; in children, it is most often associated with microscopic pathology in the brain and maturational delays in language acquisition. Also called auditory processing disorder.