Interview with Jack Katz Ph.D.
Share:
Topic: "The Early Days"
Beck: Hi Jack. Thanks for joining me today.
Katz: Good Morning Doug. Always nice to spend time with you.
Beck: Jack, I'd like to start by reviewing your educational and professional history, as it relates to communication disorders. How did you get interested in Communication Disorders?
Katz: In a high school English class, we had to write an essay about our goals, strengths and weaknesses. I wrote about working with people and helping them as best I could. My teacher wrote across my paper... "Look into Speech Correction." I had no idea what speech correction was, but as I learned more I got ever more interested in it.
Beck: Well, she was obviously right! Where did you get your bachelor's degree?
Katz: I went to Brooklyn College still with the intention of studying biology, but during my first week when I visited the speech and hearing clinic, I said.... "The heck with biology!" I found something that absolutely fascinated me and I loved it from day-one. We had wonderful professors, like Robert West, the first president of ASHA. He had a profound effect on my thinking about communication, organic predisposition, and the CNS. He didn't give the usual types of tests...he had us come into his office in ones and twos, and then probed our thoughts to evaluate our knowledge and thinking processes. In those days Speech and Hearing was not well known so students generally came to this major late in their undergraduate programs, but I started off as a freshman. So at the end I ran out of classes to take and had the rare opportunity to take independent studies from Dr. West and Oliver Bloodstein, a marvelous professor and a superb human being. For Dr. West I transposed Eisenson's Aphasia test into Yiddish (that was actually used by professionals) and for Dr. Bloodstein I developed a questionnaire about stuttering and tried to solve the riddle of stuttering with the responses from my 12 subjects. While it did not resolve all the important issues of stuttering, it did whet my appetite for research and gave me some good insights.
Beck: So you studied speech first, and then went into audiology?
Katz: In those days it was both "speech and hearing" and you could actually practice with an undergraduate degree in either field! I worked in Syracuse, NY part-time as a speech and hearing therapist while working on my master's. I had my first close encounter with audiology during my time at Syracuse University. There I had classes from and observed therapy of Louis M. DiCarlo. I believe he was the most phenomenal clinician ever, he was magical. While he was a little rough and a bit crude, he was wonderfully gifted in many other ways. Dr. DiCarlo could get the most phenomenal therapeutic results; often with no obvious therapeutic technique (you can check with other students of his to see that this is no exaggeration). Just watching him work was inspirational and educational.
Beck: And so you finished your master's at Syracuse?
Katz: Yes, in 1957 I got my master's in speech and hearing. And after a year of working in three central schools in NY State, went on for my Ph.D.
Beck: When did you start working on auditory processing and related issues?
Katz: Well, that came about very early. In 1957 after getting my M.S. degree, I worked as a speech and hearing therapist. I was determined to pursue the ideas of my professor Charles Mange that auditory problems could underlie both speech and reading problems. So the first thing that I did was to devise the Phonemic Synthesis test (similar to the one we use today) and enlisted the talents of the reading specialist to help evaluate children on my caseload who had articulation problems. We learned that Phonemic Synthesis (a sound blending type task) was indeed a problem common to those with articulation and reading problems.
Beck: Auditory processing was not very popular at that time was it?
Katz: No, not at all. In fact, I was nearly laughed out of the speech department where I was studying for my doctorate. Many of the professors thought an underlying auditory problem was ridiculous. Their collective mental set was to solve communication problems by counseling. It was clear to me that despite their strong belief in the non-directive counseling approach of Carl Rogers they could not correct cerebral palsy and many other disorders with that technique no matter how good a technique it was. When I mentioned that there might be a link between reading problems, articulation, and auditory skills, they thought that was the funniest thing they ever heard! That is when I switched from speech to audiology and never looked back.
Beck: Where did you get your Ph.D.?
Katz: I did my doctoral studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and I had several great professors. Aubrey Epstein introduced me to the fascinating work in audiology while I was still in speech. He guided me through the hurdles as there were personality problems among the faculty. Another important influence was Bob Bilger who came on the faculty in my second year. I found him spellbinding in presenting hearing science. Norma Hopkinson was a superb clinical supervisor and I am still guided by her teaching. So I had a rich experience at Pitt. This included lots of knowledge about audiology, speech, psychology and statistics. I finished my doctorate in 1961.
Beck: What was your dissertation on?
Katz: I was curious about peculiar auditory phenomena in those with conductive losses and spoke to Dr. Epstein about my ideas. He was quite interested but made me an offer I could not refuse. I could earn $5000 if I conducted a different study for him dealing with conductive losses. His idea sounded a lot better than mine (especially the $5000 for a poor grad student) and in retrospect I realized that his study was truly far better than mine. We studied people with normal hearing and various types of conductive loss using temporary threshold shift as the measure. The study looked at recovery from low-level puretone stimulation for 3 minutes. Those in the otosclerosis group didn't recover from the stimulation over 3 minutes of tracing their thresholds using Bekesy audiometry. We proposed a non-mechanical factor associated with conductive loss based on the duration and extent of loss. This preceded the interest in otitis media as it relates to CAPD, but this deprivation phenomenon is likely a component of that CAP influence.
Beck: Your initial work was not with CAP cases but rather central site-of- lesion. When did that happen and how did you get involved with it?
Katz: In 1960 I learned that Bocca in Italy and Matzker in Germany were using speech tests to detect central nervous system lesions via hearing tests -- and I was hooked! It was just amazing to me because audiology was in the fairly early stages of distinguishing cochlear from VIII nerve lesions and these people were talking about 'the brain'. In those days we did not even learn about the central auditory nervous system in university courses. That night the Staggered Spondaic Word (SSW) test occurred to me while I was feeding our infant son, Mark, at midnight! As I was feeding him my brain was going a million miles an hour. When I put him to bed I started feverishly writing down the ideas, and came up with the first 30 SSW items that night before his next feeding at 2 a.m.
Beck: So if Mark wasn't hungry at that moment, and if it hadn't been your turn to feed him, we might never have had the SSW?
Katz: Good point. Actually, Mark was only 2 months old and had had surgery that required that he be fed every 2 hours through the day and night. My wife had all the other feedings so I gave her a little break each night so she could get some sleep by feeding him at midnight and 2 a.m.
Beck: Where did you first study the SSW?
Katz: We made the first SSW recording in 1961. It was at Northern Illinois University in De Kalb, where I had my first teaching job as an assistant professor.
Beck: Did you realize how different and valuable the SSW was at that point?
Katz: Well, I was very excited about the idea, but when we made the first recording my initial thought was that it would never work because it was too easy. When listening to it even the overlapped words sounded separated so I feared that no one would have trouble with it. My fears were increased when the normals did just fine, but then the pathological patients that we tested really broke down, and that's when it dawned on me that we had something of importance. But there is no way that I could have imagined that it would go this far, we'd learn so much, and that we would still be using it more than 40 years later.
Beck: And the rest is history! I cannot imagine how you went about finding subjects in DeKalb, Illinois, in the early 1960s?
Katz: Yes, that was an issue. There was no such thing as even "learning disabilities" or "auditory processing disorders" back then so these were very unusual things we were doing in DeKalb, and of course, it was very hard to find patients with known brain lesions. I spoke to a physician about getting patients and he looked at me as though I was from Mars. So what we did was look for people who had unilateral paralysis/weakness of an arm or leg. Luckily, the students were able to find subjects on campus and around (e.g., one man was working in the cafeteria and another man was just walking down the street, but the students set out after him and convinced him to come in for testing (if the current IRB and HIPAA regulations were in place then, we would be rotting in jail today). We tested normals, those with hearing loss, those with apparent brain lesions and the elderly in the very first study. We learned a great deal from it and were able to craft better studies later on.
Beck: And then after a year, you went to Tulane?
Katz: I liked NIU very much but in addition to the audiology and speech- language courses that I taught they scheduled me to teach a course in public speaking (that I had never taken nor was interested in or actually had time for), so I took a position at Tulane University. It was wonderful working with people in otology, neurology, pharmacology and psychology. I stayed there for three years, and then took a position in Kansas City. I thought I was going for an academic position and would work with Neil Goetzinger an audiologist par excellance at KU, but it turned out to be a position as Director of the Speech and Hearing Department at Menorah Medical Center. As you know things happen for the best. We did many innovative things in speech and hearing at MMC and worked closely with physicians, psychologists and social workers as well as with those in the schools. It was my first exposure to Central Auditory Processing as we know it today. We worked with children and adults with learning disabilities as well as with psychiatric and many other disabilities. Much of the work we did continued to be with site-of-lesion cases but the knowledge we gained was then applied to evaluation and therapy for those with CAPD. However we quickly learned that CAPD was not brain damage and when the problems were of an academic or speech nature our contributions were completely different than when working with adults with brain lesions.
Beck: How long were you at Menorah?
Katz: I was there 9 years, during which I had a sabbatical, so my family and I went to live and work in Turkey. Of course that was just extraordinary professionally -- and otherwise! Among the many things that we did was develop a Turkish SSW test and develop and norm a picture vocabulary test based on the PPVT. Both are still in use there -- 32 years later.
Beck: Why Turkey?
Katz: They needed speech-language and hearing programs in their country, and when a professor in psychology was asked to recommend someone he chose me as a person who could help them. I was sent as a Fulbright lecturer. When we got there, there were a few programs up and running, but I was able to help bring new concepts to them and demonstrate procedures as well as to critique their clinical work. We were in Turkey for a year, but I went back once after that. In 1990 I lectured and visited with my former colleagues and students who by this time were the leaders in speech and hearing in Turkey. It was very gratifying to see what they had done in the intervening years.
Beck: And I guess it was soon after returning from Turkey that you went to the University at Buffalo (UB)?
Katz: Well, soon after the first edition of the Handbook of Clinical Audiology (HOCA) was published, I got a phone call from Derek Sanders (from UB). They had a position opening which sounded very good to me. Dr. Sanders and I were classmates at Syracuse. When they started to use HOCA as their textbook they decided to invite me. So, I went to Buffalo and interviewed. During the interview process, the weather was amazingly mild for a December day in Buffalo (Derek intimated that of course it's beautiful in winter in Buffalo—he said I should ignore Buffalo's bad press), and the department was great, and provided much freedom...so I took the job. Of course, then the weather changed and went back to "Buffalo normal" but by then it was too late, I was already on the faculty! But truly, the program and students were wonderful, and although my wife thought it would be a short stay, we spent most of my career there and I am grateful for those opportunities.
Beck: And that's where I had the good fortune to meet you...I started the undergraduate program at UB in the late 1970s, and I earned my undergraduate and my master's degree there. So I can say first-hand, it really was a wonderful program. And by the time we met, the SSW was going gangbusters all over the globe, and you had so much data...I think many of us were sustained academically just trying to organize and report on the data you had already collected! In fact, I think I still have some cardboard boxes filled with SSW Reports somewhere!
Katz: Yes Doug, your next assignment is to read those SSW Reports! It was a heady time; so many people were getting involved in central testing and in using the SSW. There are now 16 different SSW tests around the world that I know of (including recent ones in Argentina and Australia and one almost completed in Farsi in Iran). I also had the opportunity to work and gather data at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo. I worked with a neurosurgeon there testing a large group of patients with corpus collosum tumors, which showed us how these tumors impacted SSW test results. That's where we discovered the Type-A SSW pattern (often seen in dyslexics) to be present in 1/3rd of these corpus collosum patients. We did a CT scan study at another hospital with a well known neurologist Larry Jacobs. He was amazed that the SSW could accurately pinpoint the site-of-lesion so quickly. He told me I was the smartest person he knew. I was flattered, of course, but then I began to wonder how many people he knew. Unfortunately, he died last year so I am unable to ask him.
Beck: So when you got to UB, were central auditory processing disorders accepted as a clinical entity?
Katz: No, I was amazed that with all we knew and all we could do that there was such total resistance. In fact, it was dismissed because none of the faculty thought it had any value, and some of my colleagues railed against CAP in their classes! The first two years at UB I didn't have a single student that would get involved with CAPD. In fact one day after class, a student asked me in confidence "are there REALLY such patients?" I said no, I was just kidding ;-) Later on, one student who worked with me and was sold on CAPD spoke up when her professor demeaned it. The other students promptly tore into her for heresy. One of her tormentors told me what they had done and so I insisted that the professor give me an opportunity to rebut, and she gladly accommodated me. I gave the students a chance to test their professor's statement that we do not need to auditorily process speech 'because humans are so intuitive'. They found out that without hearing clear speech they were not so intuitive. Slowly they started to open up and change their minds. While those early days were quite a struggle, having to defend my viewpoint academically and clinically forced me to think more theoretically and this yielded the first CAPD category system (called the Buffalo Model). So we came a long way. By the time I retired from UB in June, 2002, you couldn't say anything negative about CAPD, and of course, that's not good either.
Beck: Jack, thanks so much for sharing your story. I know we've only scratched the surface regarding your history and the acceptance of CAPD, but I am grateful for your time, your recollections, your knowledge and guidance!
Katz: Thank you too Doug. I appreciate your continued interest in my work, and it's always fun to work with you.
----------------
Dr. Katz has a private practice where he limits his work to diagnosis, therapy, consultation, and parent education for auditory processing disorders.
Please feel free to contact Dr. Katz at:
Auditory Processing Service
5250 West 94th Terrace
Prairie Village, Kansas, 66207
913-643-0123
jackkatz@buffalo.edu
Katz: Good Morning Doug. Always nice to spend time with you.
Beck: Jack, I'd like to start by reviewing your educational and professional history, as it relates to communication disorders. How did you get interested in Communication Disorders?
Katz: In a high school English class, we had to write an essay about our goals, strengths and weaknesses. I wrote about working with people and helping them as best I could. My teacher wrote across my paper... "Look into Speech Correction." I had no idea what speech correction was, but as I learned more I got ever more interested in it.
Beck: Well, she was obviously right! Where did you get your bachelor's degree?
Katz: I went to Brooklyn College still with the intention of studying biology, but during my first week when I visited the speech and hearing clinic, I said.... "The heck with biology!" I found something that absolutely fascinated me and I loved it from day-one. We had wonderful professors, like Robert West, the first president of ASHA. He had a profound effect on my thinking about communication, organic predisposition, and the CNS. He didn't give the usual types of tests...he had us come into his office in ones and twos, and then probed our thoughts to evaluate our knowledge and thinking processes. In those days Speech and Hearing was not well known so students generally came to this major late in their undergraduate programs, but I started off as a freshman. So at the end I ran out of classes to take and had the rare opportunity to take independent studies from Dr. West and Oliver Bloodstein, a marvelous professor and a superb human being. For Dr. West I transposed Eisenson's Aphasia test into Yiddish (that was actually used by professionals) and for Dr. Bloodstein I developed a questionnaire about stuttering and tried to solve the riddle of stuttering with the responses from my 12 subjects. While it did not resolve all the important issues of stuttering, it did whet my appetite for research and gave me some good insights.
Beck: So you studied speech first, and then went into audiology?
Katz: In those days it was both "speech and hearing" and you could actually practice with an undergraduate degree in either field! I worked in Syracuse, NY part-time as a speech and hearing therapist while working on my master's. I had my first close encounter with audiology during my time at Syracuse University. There I had classes from and observed therapy of Louis M. DiCarlo. I believe he was the most phenomenal clinician ever, he was magical. While he was a little rough and a bit crude, he was wonderfully gifted in many other ways. Dr. DiCarlo could get the most phenomenal therapeutic results; often with no obvious therapeutic technique (you can check with other students of his to see that this is no exaggeration). Just watching him work was inspirational and educational.
Beck: And so you finished your master's at Syracuse?
Katz: Yes, in 1957 I got my master's in speech and hearing. And after a year of working in three central schools in NY State, went on for my Ph.D.
Beck: When did you start working on auditory processing and related issues?
Katz: Well, that came about very early. In 1957 after getting my M.S. degree, I worked as a speech and hearing therapist. I was determined to pursue the ideas of my professor Charles Mange that auditory problems could underlie both speech and reading problems. So the first thing that I did was to devise the Phonemic Synthesis test (similar to the one we use today) and enlisted the talents of the reading specialist to help evaluate children on my caseload who had articulation problems. We learned that Phonemic Synthesis (a sound blending type task) was indeed a problem common to those with articulation and reading problems.
Beck: Auditory processing was not very popular at that time was it?
Katz: No, not at all. In fact, I was nearly laughed out of the speech department where I was studying for my doctorate. Many of the professors thought an underlying auditory problem was ridiculous. Their collective mental set was to solve communication problems by counseling. It was clear to me that despite their strong belief in the non-directive counseling approach of Carl Rogers they could not correct cerebral palsy and many other disorders with that technique no matter how good a technique it was. When I mentioned that there might be a link between reading problems, articulation, and auditory skills, they thought that was the funniest thing they ever heard! That is when I switched from speech to audiology and never looked back.
Beck: Where did you get your Ph.D.?
Katz: I did my doctoral studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and I had several great professors. Aubrey Epstein introduced me to the fascinating work in audiology while I was still in speech. He guided me through the hurdles as there were personality problems among the faculty. Another important influence was Bob Bilger who came on the faculty in my second year. I found him spellbinding in presenting hearing science. Norma Hopkinson was a superb clinical supervisor and I am still guided by her teaching. So I had a rich experience at Pitt. This included lots of knowledge about audiology, speech, psychology and statistics. I finished my doctorate in 1961.
Beck: What was your dissertation on?
Katz: I was curious about peculiar auditory phenomena in those with conductive losses and spoke to Dr. Epstein about my ideas. He was quite interested but made me an offer I could not refuse. I could earn $5000 if I conducted a different study for him dealing with conductive losses. His idea sounded a lot better than mine (especially the $5000 for a poor grad student) and in retrospect I realized that his study was truly far better than mine. We studied people with normal hearing and various types of conductive loss using temporary threshold shift as the measure. The study looked at recovery from low-level puretone stimulation for 3 minutes. Those in the otosclerosis group didn't recover from the stimulation over 3 minutes of tracing their thresholds using Bekesy audiometry. We proposed a non-mechanical factor associated with conductive loss based on the duration and extent of loss. This preceded the interest in otitis media as it relates to CAPD, but this deprivation phenomenon is likely a component of that CAP influence.
Beck: Your initial work was not with CAP cases but rather central site-of- lesion. When did that happen and how did you get involved with it?
Katz: In 1960 I learned that Bocca in Italy and Matzker in Germany were using speech tests to detect central nervous system lesions via hearing tests -- and I was hooked! It was just amazing to me because audiology was in the fairly early stages of distinguishing cochlear from VIII nerve lesions and these people were talking about 'the brain'. In those days we did not even learn about the central auditory nervous system in university courses. That night the Staggered Spondaic Word (SSW) test occurred to me while I was feeding our infant son, Mark, at midnight! As I was feeding him my brain was going a million miles an hour. When I put him to bed I started feverishly writing down the ideas, and came up with the first 30 SSW items that night before his next feeding at 2 a.m.
Beck: So if Mark wasn't hungry at that moment, and if it hadn't been your turn to feed him, we might never have had the SSW?
Katz: Good point. Actually, Mark was only 2 months old and had had surgery that required that he be fed every 2 hours through the day and night. My wife had all the other feedings so I gave her a little break each night so she could get some sleep by feeding him at midnight and 2 a.m.
Beck: Where did you first study the SSW?
Katz: We made the first SSW recording in 1961. It was at Northern Illinois University in De Kalb, where I had my first teaching job as an assistant professor.
Beck: Did you realize how different and valuable the SSW was at that point?
Katz: Well, I was very excited about the idea, but when we made the first recording my initial thought was that it would never work because it was too easy. When listening to it even the overlapped words sounded separated so I feared that no one would have trouble with it. My fears were increased when the normals did just fine, but then the pathological patients that we tested really broke down, and that's when it dawned on me that we had something of importance. But there is no way that I could have imagined that it would go this far, we'd learn so much, and that we would still be using it more than 40 years later.
Beck: And the rest is history! I cannot imagine how you went about finding subjects in DeKalb, Illinois, in the early 1960s?
Katz: Yes, that was an issue. There was no such thing as even "learning disabilities" or "auditory processing disorders" back then so these were very unusual things we were doing in DeKalb, and of course, it was very hard to find patients with known brain lesions. I spoke to a physician about getting patients and he looked at me as though I was from Mars. So what we did was look for people who had unilateral paralysis/weakness of an arm or leg. Luckily, the students were able to find subjects on campus and around (e.g., one man was working in the cafeteria and another man was just walking down the street, but the students set out after him and convinced him to come in for testing (if the current IRB and HIPAA regulations were in place then, we would be rotting in jail today). We tested normals, those with hearing loss, those with apparent brain lesions and the elderly in the very first study. We learned a great deal from it and were able to craft better studies later on.
Beck: And then after a year, you went to Tulane?
Katz: I liked NIU very much but in addition to the audiology and speech- language courses that I taught they scheduled me to teach a course in public speaking (that I had never taken nor was interested in or actually had time for), so I took a position at Tulane University. It was wonderful working with people in otology, neurology, pharmacology and psychology. I stayed there for three years, and then took a position in Kansas City. I thought I was going for an academic position and would work with Neil Goetzinger an audiologist par excellance at KU, but it turned out to be a position as Director of the Speech and Hearing Department at Menorah Medical Center. As you know things happen for the best. We did many innovative things in speech and hearing at MMC and worked closely with physicians, psychologists and social workers as well as with those in the schools. It was my first exposure to Central Auditory Processing as we know it today. We worked with children and adults with learning disabilities as well as with psychiatric and many other disabilities. Much of the work we did continued to be with site-of-lesion cases but the knowledge we gained was then applied to evaluation and therapy for those with CAPD. However we quickly learned that CAPD was not brain damage and when the problems were of an academic or speech nature our contributions were completely different than when working with adults with brain lesions.
Beck: How long were you at Menorah?
Katz: I was there 9 years, during which I had a sabbatical, so my family and I went to live and work in Turkey. Of course that was just extraordinary professionally -- and otherwise! Among the many things that we did was develop a Turkish SSW test and develop and norm a picture vocabulary test based on the PPVT. Both are still in use there -- 32 years later.
Beck: Why Turkey?
Katz: They needed speech-language and hearing programs in their country, and when a professor in psychology was asked to recommend someone he chose me as a person who could help them. I was sent as a Fulbright lecturer. When we got there, there were a few programs up and running, but I was able to help bring new concepts to them and demonstrate procedures as well as to critique their clinical work. We were in Turkey for a year, but I went back once after that. In 1990 I lectured and visited with my former colleagues and students who by this time were the leaders in speech and hearing in Turkey. It was very gratifying to see what they had done in the intervening years.
Beck: And I guess it was soon after returning from Turkey that you went to the University at Buffalo (UB)?
Katz: Well, soon after the first edition of the Handbook of Clinical Audiology (HOCA) was published, I got a phone call from Derek Sanders (from UB). They had a position opening which sounded very good to me. Dr. Sanders and I were classmates at Syracuse. When they started to use HOCA as their textbook they decided to invite me. So, I went to Buffalo and interviewed. During the interview process, the weather was amazingly mild for a December day in Buffalo (Derek intimated that of course it's beautiful in winter in Buffalo—he said I should ignore Buffalo's bad press), and the department was great, and provided much freedom...so I took the job. Of course, then the weather changed and went back to "Buffalo normal" but by then it was too late, I was already on the faculty! But truly, the program and students were wonderful, and although my wife thought it would be a short stay, we spent most of my career there and I am grateful for those opportunities.
Beck: And that's where I had the good fortune to meet you...I started the undergraduate program at UB in the late 1970s, and I earned my undergraduate and my master's degree there. So I can say first-hand, it really was a wonderful program. And by the time we met, the SSW was going gangbusters all over the globe, and you had so much data...I think many of us were sustained academically just trying to organize and report on the data you had already collected! In fact, I think I still have some cardboard boxes filled with SSW Reports somewhere!
Katz: Yes Doug, your next assignment is to read those SSW Reports! It was a heady time; so many people were getting involved in central testing and in using the SSW. There are now 16 different SSW tests around the world that I know of (including recent ones in Argentina and Australia and one almost completed in Farsi in Iran). I also had the opportunity to work and gather data at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo. I worked with a neurosurgeon there testing a large group of patients with corpus collosum tumors, which showed us how these tumors impacted SSW test results. That's where we discovered the Type-A SSW pattern (often seen in dyslexics) to be present in 1/3rd of these corpus collosum patients. We did a CT scan study at another hospital with a well known neurologist Larry Jacobs. He was amazed that the SSW could accurately pinpoint the site-of-lesion so quickly. He told me I was the smartest person he knew. I was flattered, of course, but then I began to wonder how many people he knew. Unfortunately, he died last year so I am unable to ask him.
Beck: So when you got to UB, were central auditory processing disorders accepted as a clinical entity?
Katz: No, I was amazed that with all we knew and all we could do that there was such total resistance. In fact, it was dismissed because none of the faculty thought it had any value, and some of my colleagues railed against CAP in their classes! The first two years at UB I didn't have a single student that would get involved with CAPD. In fact one day after class, a student asked me in confidence "are there REALLY such patients?" I said no, I was just kidding ;-) Later on, one student who worked with me and was sold on CAPD spoke up when her professor demeaned it. The other students promptly tore into her for heresy. One of her tormentors told me what they had done and so I insisted that the professor give me an opportunity to rebut, and she gladly accommodated me. I gave the students a chance to test their professor's statement that we do not need to auditorily process speech 'because humans are so intuitive'. They found out that without hearing clear speech they were not so intuitive. Slowly they started to open up and change their minds. While those early days were quite a struggle, having to defend my viewpoint academically and clinically forced me to think more theoretically and this yielded the first CAPD category system (called the Buffalo Model). So we came a long way. By the time I retired from UB in June, 2002, you couldn't say anything negative about CAPD, and of course, that's not good either.
Beck: Jack, thanks so much for sharing your story. I know we've only scratched the surface regarding your history and the acceptance of CAPD, but I am grateful for your time, your recollections, your knowledge and guidance!
Katz: Thank you too Doug. I appreciate your continued interest in my work, and it's always fun to work with you.
----------------
Dr. Katz has a private practice where he limits his work to diagnosis, therapy, consultation, and parent education for auditory processing disorders.
Please feel free to contact Dr. Katz at:
Auditory Processing Service
5250 West 94th Terrace
Prairie Village, Kansas, 66207
913-643-0123
jackkatz@buffalo.edu
Jack Katz, PhD, CCC-A/SLP
Jack Katz has been involved in the study of central auditory disorders for over five decades. He has developed effective tests and therapy procedures to evaluate and remediate this prevalent problem. He has editied several books on this topic and has written many articles and chapters and has presented on this topic nationally and internationally. He has just completed a book focusing on therapy for APD that will be distributed by Educational Audiology Association. Dr. Katz has spent 50 years developing the SSW test as a measure of central auditory function.