Children (N=20, age 9-12) with severe dyslexia were slower in counting from memory and naming alternating digits and letters than children with milder reading impairment. The children most disabled also had poorer phonological sensitivity, shorter digit spans, and lower verbal intelligence quotients. (Author/DB)

The study demonstrated that 36 male children (ages 7-10) with learning problems were characterized not by a restricted vocabulary as such (i.e., the variance common to both receptive and productive vocabulary measures) but by a hampered production of words (i.e., the variance common to both speed-of-naming and productive vocabulary measures.…

Sixty students with specific learning disabilities in either reading and spelling (Group R-S) or arithmetic (Group A), as scored by the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery, were compared. Results (measured by the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition) showed weaker nonverbal skills and more counseling among Group A…

The validity of Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) Verbal-Mathematical discrepancies as indicators of college learning disability (LD) was assessed for four groups of LD students (Total N about 5000) taking different test formats. Comparison with non-LD student scores indicated no evidence of larger discrepancies for the LD groups. (Author/DB)

Although there are many remediation materials for learning disabled children available commercially, with more being produced none are as universally available or as economical as comic strips. (Author)

A study examined the role of intelligence in the definition of reading disabilities in languages with different orthographic systems. The study included 94 Spanish children and 157 English-speaking Canadian children and found significant differences between the languages when reading performances was analyzed as a function of verbal IQ scores.…

Twelve learning-disabled (LD) children (ages 9-11) with language impairments performed more poorly on 3 verbal metaphor tasks and a visual metaphor task than 12 LD children without language impairments, who, in turn, performed more poorly than 12 nondisabled children on all but the visual task. Context variations had no effect on performance.…

Twenty-four gifted children with learning disabilities and a control group of nondisabled gifted children were administered the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised. The 8- to 12-year-old subjects were found to be more reliant on verbal conceptualization and reasoning than controls and demonstrated deficiencies in short-term auditory…

Additional analysis of a previously published study involving 128 first-graders with double or triple deficit in language skills (rapid automatized naming, phonological, and orthographic processing) responded more slowly to early intervention than students without language deficits. Verbal IQ-word reading discrepancy did not predict response to…

In this commentary on Linda Siegel's paper (EC221505), it is argued that a minimum level of general ability is needed for successful reading performance. Above this threshold other kinds of intelligence are required and more important is the contribution of verbal efficiency, which is predicated on the covariance of phonology, morphology, and…

Eight school-aged boys with learning disabilities (LD) with a discrepancy between verbal and performance IQ and with more language difficulties were less successful on a mother/child problem-solving task. Their mothers exhibited lower communication clarity in their instructions to the children than the mothers of the eight boys with LD who did not…

Two studies of second graders at risk for reading disability, which were guided by levels of language and functional reading system theory, focused on reading comprehension in this population. In Study 1 (n = 96), confirmatory factor analysis of five comprehension measures loaded on one factor in both fall and spring of second grade. Phonological…

Data from 143 children with reading disabilities (RD), 100 with arithmetic disabilities (AD), and 121 controls (ages 6-16) found the RD and AD groups had significantly lower scores on all verbal IQ subtests. Many also showed significant differences between verbal and performance IQ scores, but so did many controls. (Contains references.)…

Verbal-retelling abilities for social-studies lectures were examined in 20 adolescent boys with language-learning disabilities and 29 with normal language abilities. Lectures had either a comparison expository discourse structure or a causation discourse structure. Results indicated that the comparison discourse structure facilitated more…