|
| Free e-mail Newsletter on Learning Disability News & Advocacy |
|
| Free e-mail Newsletter on Learning Disability News & Advocacy |
Posted by Peg Duncan
One good source of information of NLDs is:
Asperger Syndrome: Treatment and Intervention
http://www.ldanatl.org/Asperger.html
The following has been extracted from:
Yale/LDA Social Learning Disabilities Study
http://info.med.yale.edu/chldstdy/autism/ldabro.html
(The whole article is longer and well worth the read.)
"In neuropsychology, a great deal of research has been devoted to
Rourke's (1989) concept of Nonverbal Learning Disabilities syndrome
(NLD). The main contribution of this line of research has been the
attempt to delineate the implications for the child's social and
emotional development of a unique profile of neuropsychological assets
and deficits that appears to have a deleterious impact on the person's
capacity for socialization as well as on the person's interactive and
communicative styles. The neuropsychological characteristics of
individuals with the NLD profile include deficits in tactile perception,
psychomotor coordination, visual-spatial organization, nonverbal
problem-solving, and appreciation of incongruities and humor. NLD
individuals also exhibit well developed rote verbal capacities and
verbal memory skills, difficulty in adapting to novel and complex
situations, and over reliance on rote behaviors in such situations,
relative deficits in mechanical arithmetic as compared to proficiencies
in single-word reading, poor pragmatics and prosody in speech, and
significant deficits
in social perception, social judgment, and social interaction skills.
There are marked deficits in the appreciation of subtle and even fairly
obvious nonverbal aspects of communication, that often result in other
person's social disdain and rejection. As a result, NLD individuals show
a marked tendency toward social withdrawal and are at risk for
development of serious mood disorders.
Many of the clinical features clustered together in NLD have also been
described in the neurological literature as a form of Developmental
Learning Disability of the Right Hemisphere (Denckla, 1983; Voeller,
1986). Children presenting with this condition have also been shown to
exhibit profound disturbances in interpretation and expression of affect
and other basic interpersonal skills. Finally, an additional term
researched in the literature, semantic-pragmatic disorder (Bishop,
1989), has also captured aspects of NLD and AS.
It is currently unclear whether these concepts describe different
entities or, more probably, provide different perspectives on a
heterogeneous, yet overlapping, group of individuals sharing at least
some common aspects. An important goal of current research is to seek a
convergence between the various discipline-specific accounts in order to
make use of different methodologies in the effort to validate the
behaviorally defined concept of AS. However, in order to enhance
comparability of studies, it is of great importance to establish
consensual and stringent guidelines for the diagnosis of AS,
particularly in regard to its similarities with related conditions. "