Nonverbal learning disorder

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common disorders in school-age children. In addition to learning difficulties associated with the disorder's core symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity, children with ADHD display substantial social impairments. Methylphenidate (MPH) in formulations such as Ritalin or Concerta mitigates inattention and hyperactivity, but the effects of the therapy on social behavior in children with ADHD are not clear. This review aims to determine the effectiveness of short term (up to 6 months) MPH treatment on three domains of social skills in children aged 6-14 with ADHD: (i) Recognition of nonverbal emotional expressions, which are a marker of inherent (unlearned) social understanding, (ii) theory of mind (ToM) components that relate to learned cognition and social communication, and (iii) social competence in everyday environments...

We examined whether different parent- and teacher-related factors had an effect on at-risk children's reading development during the first six months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Seventy Grade 1 English-speaking Canadian children (28 females, 42 males; M age = 6.60, SD  = 0.46) who were at-risk for reading difficulties were administered word and pseudoword reading, nonverbal IQ, and phonological awareness tasks before the school closures (February 2020; Time 1). Reading tasks were administered again when they returned to school in September 2020 (Time 2)...

Individuals who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) are often excluded from learning literacy skills that use phonological approaches due to challenges with verbal production of speech sounds. This study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of systematic literacy instruction with materials modified to teach letter-sound correspondences (LSC) to pre-adolescent and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) with minimal or no speech who use AAC. A single subject design across three letter-sound sets was used, with three individuals with ASD...

PURPOSE: This study investigates how Cantonese language experience influences the potential effects of (a) musicianship and (b) musical ability on English stress perception. METHOD: The sample contained 124 participants, evenly split into Cantonese musician, Cantonese nonmusician, English musician, and English nonmusician groups. They completed the English stress discrimination task, English stress sequence recall task, Musical Ear Test, and nonverbal intelligence task...

Introduction: The aim of this study was to compare children with Specific Learning Disorders (SLD) and matched controls in terms of nonverbal communication skills, understanding of emotions, electrodermal activity (EDA) changes and response latencies measured with affective stimuli. Method: The study was designed as a single-center, cross-sectional, controlled study. KA-SI Empathic Tendency Scale-Child Form, Test of Perception of Affect-Via Nonverbal Cues (TPANC) were used for both groups...

Autistic children have difficulty communicating wants, needs, and thoughts. In cases of low functioning autism, an individual can have serious speech and language disabilities. In response to the need of parents and therapists dealing with autistic children, social robots have been developed and incorporated into assisting children with autism. Research studies have proved the possibility of improving autistic children's lives using social robots. However, not any social robot can successfully fulfil this task, since autistic children are sensitive to certain behaviours, shapes, and colours...

BACKGROUND: The cognitive profile in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS) is often characterized by a discrepancy between nonverbal vs. verbal reasoning skills, in favor of the latter skills. This dissociation has also been observed in memory, with verbal learning skills described as a relative strength. Yet the development of these skills is still to be investigated. We thus aimed to explore verbal learning longitudinally. Furthermore, we explored verbal learning and its respective associations with hippocampal alterations and psychosis, which remain largely unknown despite their high prevalence in 22q11...

Dysfunctional social communication is one of the most stable characteristics in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD) that severely affects quality of life. Interpreting abstract speech and integrating nonverbal information is particularly affected. Considering the difficulty to treat communication dysfunctions with usual intervention, we investigated the possibility to apply a multimodal speech-gesture (MSG) training. In the MSG training, we offered 8 sessions (60 min each) including perceptive and expressive tasks as well as meta-learning elements and transfer exercises to 29 patients with SSD...

BACKGROUND: Children with Down syndrome (DS) often experience behavioral and emotional issues that complicate their socialization process and may lead to psychopathological disorders. These problems may be related to deficits affecting emotional knowledge, particularly emotional vocabulary. Because emotional vocabulary makes it easier for typically developing children to identify emotions, a deficit affecting it in DS could be problematic. METHODS: Twenty-eight adolescents with DS matched with typically developing (TD) children for their score on the Benton Facial Recognition Test were asked to recognize six emotional expressions presented in the form of filmed sequences, based on (1) nonverbal cues such as prosody, and (2) an emotional label...

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) has long been thought to be determined by multiple components. Dyscalculia has high comorbidity with other learning and developmental disabilities, including reading and writing disorders, attention deficits, and problems in visual/spatial skills, short memory, and working memory. This study aims to assess prevalence rates for isolated as well as comorbid DD in a sample of Italian-speaking children. In addition, we studied the neuropsychological profile of children with isolated or combined dyscalculia...

Key-word-signing (KWS), an unaided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) strategy, has an important role to play in the education system. To date, limited research exists regarding the use of unaided AAC strategies in the school environment, especially in low- and middle-income countries. To address this research gap, the current study aimed to explore the perceptions of South African teachers toward the use of KWS strategies in the educational context. The study used a descriptive paper-based survey comprised of both closed and open-ended questions that was completed by 101 special education teachers...

OBJECTIVE: The authors' objective was to study clinical, imaging, and neuropsychological changes in children who underwent surgery for a temporal arachnoid cyst (TAC). METHODS: Thirty-four children were prospectively assessed similarly at diagnosis and postoperatively (mean 14 months) with clinic visits, images, cognitive tests, and parental questionnaires on mood/behavior and executive functions. The scores were compared pre- and postoperatively for the entire cohort and individually...

BACKGROUND: PTEN hamartoma tumor syndrome (PHTS) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by mTOR (mechanistic target of rapamycin) overactivity. Limited data suggest that mTOR inhibitors may be therapeutic. No placebo-controlled studies have examined mTOR inhibition on cognition and behavior in humans with PHTS with/without autism. METHODS: We conducted a 6-month phase II, randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial to examine the safety profile and efficacy of everolimus (4...

Characterizing the functioning of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders is crucial to their diagnosis. Research has found that children with different neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorders (ASD), attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and nonverbal learning disability (NLD), may have comorbid symptoms of anxiety and depression, and problems with pragmatic language. The main aim of the present study was to identify any differences in the above-mentioned comorbid symptoms associated with these clinical profiles...

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to use an established model of working memory in children to predict an established model of word learning to determine whether working memory explained word learning variance over and above the contributions of expressive vocabulary and nonverbal IQ. METHOD: One hundred sixty-seven English-speaking second graders (7- to 8-year-olds) with typical development from two states participated. They completed a comprehensive battery of working memory assessments and six word learning tasks that assessed the creation, storage, retrieval, and production of phonological and semantic representations of novel nouns and verbs and the ability to link those representations...

The purpose of this study was threefold: to examine unique and shared risk factors of comorbidity for reading comprehension and word-problem solving difficulties, to explore whether language minority (LM) learners are at increased risk of what we refer to as higher order comorbidity (reading comprehension and word-problem solving difficulties), and to examine the profiles of at-risk LM learners compared with at-risk non-LM learners. At-risk (LM n = 70; non-LM n = 89) and not-at-risk (LM n = 44; non-LM n = 114) students were evaluated on foundational academic (word reading, calculation), behavioral (behavioral attention), cognitive (working memory, processing speed, nonverbal reasoning), and language (vocabulary, listening comprehension) measures in English...

Temporal accounts of Developmental Dyslexia (DD) postulate that a timing impairment plays an important role in this learning disorder. However, DD has been associated with timing disorders as well as other motor and cognitive dysfunctions. It is still unclear whether nonverbal timing skills per se may be considered as independent determinants of DD. In this study, we investigated the independent contribution of predictive timing to DD above and beyond the motor and cognitive dysfunctions typically associated with this disorder...

Conversational repair has been found to play a fundamental role in the acquisition of language. This paper describes existing research on conversational repair and its relationship to language learning, whether a first language or a second language, as well as its relevance to augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). A case is made for incorporating prompts to repair in conversation-based language interventions with children learning to use AAC. We argue that interventions targeting linguistic complexity should encourage self-repair in conversation in order to develop linguistic and operational competency as well as increase automaticity when using AAC...

Many languages use the same letters to represent different sounds (e.g., the letter P represents /p/ in English but /r/ in Russian). We report two experiments that examine how native language experience impacts the acquisition and processing of words with conflicting letter-to-sound mappings. Experiment 1 revealed that individual differences in nonverbal intelligence predicted word learning and that novel words with conflicting orthography-to-phonology mappings were harder to learn when their spelling was more typical of the native language than less typical (due to increased competition from the native language)...

To efficiently learn new words, children use constraints such as mutual exclusivity (ME) to narrow the search for potential referents. The current study investigated the use of ME in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and neurotypical (NT) peers matched on nonverbal cognition. Thirty-two toddlers with ASD and 26 NT toddlers participated in a looking-while-listening task. Images of novel and familiar objects were presented along with a novel or familiar label. Overall, toddlers with ASD showed less efficient looking toward a novel referent when a novel label was presented compared to NT toddlers, controlling for age and familiar word knowledge...