"Do you have a hearing problem?" I was on break in class, and this was the first sentence I actually processed correctly. At the time, I was not diagnosed with CAPD or any other hearing difficulty, and in fact my hearing is above average in acuity. I was wary of the girl because she had been hostile in the past.
I responded, "No, not exactly."
"Then why didn't you hear me ask you a question, or are you just ignoring me?"
I gave what was my standard answer for any "hearing problem" at the time, which stemmed from my schizophrenia diagnosis. "I sometimes hear voices." But I did not hear voices, and that was not the problem. The girl was satisfied at my explanation, and pointed to another girl in the class. "She hears voices a lot; why didn't you just say so?"
I can't count the number of times people have said "Hello...", waved their hands in front of my face, or concluded me to be a "space case" because I did not hear what they were saying. In Latin class in high school, this earned me the nicknames of "Exspatiata" (which is a more literal meaning of "spaced out") and "Alias alibi" (which means, in Latin, "otherwise elsewhere").
If I do not hear or process speech, I can appear to be ignoring it. This can occur when it is so distorted as to become meaningless, when it fades into the background, when I do not notice that it is language and meant to be interpreted, or in several other situations. Usually I am not actively ignoring someone, but do sometimes appear to ignore people because their speech sounds meaningless.
CAPD.