In this presentation, I intend to describe a program called “Listening Training”. This program, which is based on the Tomatis® Method and which we have further developed at The Listening Centre in Toronto for the past twenty years, has been offered to people of all ages. In the context of this conference, however, I will concentrate on the application of Listening Training to children, especially those with developmental delays or disorders affecting their communication and learning skills. My assumption here is that many such delays or disorders are related to a problem in the listening function of these children, in whom the possibility of hearing impairment has already been ruled out.
We define listening as the ability to attune specifically to what one chooses to hear, while at the same time “de-selecting” other sounds and relegating them, so to speak, to “the background”. Furthermore, the whole body participates in active listening, not just the ear.
Before going on to discuss our own clinical experience at The Listening Centre, I will review the results, reported in three research evaluation papers, of other applications of Tomatis-based listening programs. I will then propose six categories of qualitative change that we observe among children who have participated in Listening Training, with an emphasis on children with autistic spectrum disorders. In our view, these categories suggest tentative hypotheses that point the way toward new avenues of research and clinical application in the field.
