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PubMed1983

A construct validity study of the Missouri Children's Behavior Checklist with developmentally disabled children.

Evaluated the construct validity of the MCBC scales and behavior profiles by determining the relationship between the MCBC and the clinical findings and recommendations that resulted from an interdisciplinary evaluation of children (N = 217) referred to a clinic for developmental disabilities. There were few differences in MCBC scale means and percentage occurrences of behavior profiles as a function of demographic factors and broad diagnostic categories. Substantial association was found between the MCBC and clinical findings of behavior problems. The association of the MCBC and clinical findings suggestive of affective problems was not as substantial, which suggests a need to augment the sensitivity of the MCBC in this area. The findings also suggested both the potential and the need for evolving additional MCBC behavior profiles that would reflect additional clinically meaningful subgroups among developmentally disabled children.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Vitamin K deficiency in severely disabled children.

Vitamin K status was examined in 21 severely disabled children in our hospital from September 2001 to August 2002, and 9 children were found to have a vitamin K deficiency. The 21 patients were divided into two groups: group A, 9 patients with vitamin K deficiency, and group B, 12 patients without vitamin K deficiency. The laboratory data and background factors in the two groups were compared statistically. In group A, all patients received enteral nutrition and anticonvulsants. The protein induced by vitamin K absence-II values were elevated in eight patients. Seven exhibited a bleeding tendency. Six developed vitamin K deficiency in association with infection and four were treated with antibiotics. All showed a good response to the administration of vitamin K. The patients in group A had factors such as use of antibiotics, infection, and elemental nutrition at significantly higher rates than those in group B. Data indicating nutrition factors such as body weight, caloric intake, total protein level, and hemoglobin level were not significantly different between the two groups. Severely disabled children suffer from deficiencies of various nutritional elements. However, vitamin K deficiency in severely disabled children has not been fully investigated. Infection, use of antibiotics, and elemental nutrition are risk factors for vitamin K deficiency in severely disabled children. In severely disabled children, there might be marginal vitamin K intake via enteral nutrition, so more vitamin K supplementation is necessary, especially with infection and use of antibiotics.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1994

Cognitive performance in learning disabled children with and without epilepsy.

Cognitive functioning and educational achievement were examined in learning disabled children with epilepsy (n = 65) and without epilepsy (n = 122) in order to explore whether children with epilepsy show unique types of learning problems, different from those in other learning disabled children. The learning disabled children with epilepsy tended to perform better on tests of verbal intelligence, certain achievement-related abilities and were better in one area of academic achievement, i.e. spelling. Despite their superior performance in these areas, the learning disabled children with epilepsy were slower than those without epilepsy and regular education controls (n = 100) on simple auditory and visual reaction tasks as well as on a multiple decision reaction task and a visual searching task. The results obtained with the school achievement tasks provide no clear evidence for specific types of learning impairment in children with epilepsy. Learning disabled children with epilepsy do not appear to have educational needs different from those of other learning disabled children.

Attention↗

PubMed2002

Disabled children's perceptions of technical aids, assistance and peers in play situations.

The purpose of the study was to gain a deeper understanding of how children with disabilities perceive their technical aids in play situations. Transcribed interviews with eight children with disabilities were analysed according to the constant comparative method of grounded theory described by Glaser & Strauss. Three categories were found in the data, forming a model describing the child's relations in play situations (core category): to technical aids, to assistance and to the play environment. Two of the categories included relations to adults. The children's opportunities to play required that a parent or an assistant be present. Access to the playground also required the assistance of adults. The third category, relation to technical aids, is an individual one, as the technical aids were perceived differently by all the children. The technical aids were also seen as an extension of the child. The implications for parents and service providers are discussed.

Attitude↗

PubMed1981

Abnormal head circumference in learning-disabled children.

The head circumferences of 73 learning-disabled children were compared with those of a matched control population of 71 children. Macrocephaly was noted in eight learning-disabled children but in only three controls, and microcephaly was present in seven learning-disabled children but in none of the controls. Abnormal head circumferences were noted in nine learning-disabled males but in only three control males. Since this study revealed an increased prevalence of both macrocephaly and microcephaly in children with learning disabilities, future studies of such children should include accurate measurements of head circumference. It may be found that abnormal head circumference, when accompanied by other signs, can be used to identify preschool children potentially at risk for learning disabilities.

Cephalometry↗

PubMed1983

Physiological correlates of conduct problems and anxiety in hyperactive and learning-disabled children.

Thirty-six learning disabled children (21 of whom were also classified as hyperactive) were subgrouped according to teacher ratings of tension-anxiety and conduct problems and then compared on measures of tonic and phasic autonomic arousal. The results indicated that children rated high on the conduct problem dimension evidenced smaller amplitude specific skin conductance responses, and that anxiety appeared to exert a moderating effect on physiological responses. When the hyperactive sample was considered separately, lower skin conductance levels were observed in children rated high on conduct problems than in hyperactive children rated low in conduct problems. These findings support the notion that hyperactive and learning-disabled children are heterogeneous at a physiological level and suggest that physiological differences previously attributed to hyperactivity may actually be correlates of the conduct problem dimension.

Anxiety↗

PubMed2001

Acknowledging the extra care parents give their disabled children.

Around 150,000 families in the UK care for a severely disabled child under the age of 16. Many of these families receive assistance from the Family Fund Trust, which provides grants and information relating to the care of a severely disabled child. The aim of this study was to identify patterns of extra care needs among severely disabled children known to the Trust. Extra care needs are requirements for care not experienced by similarly aged non-disabled children. The research comprised analysis of 40,000 records from the Trust database and qualitative exploration of the extra care needs of disabled children with parents and Trust staff. Although all children require parenting, the care parents give disabled children generally exceeds that given to a non-disabled child. Quantitative analysis showed that the majority of children in the sample required extra assistance or supervision with multiple areas of daily life. With each of five activities (washing, dressing, meal times, during the night and keeping occupied), >70% of children needed extra help and, on average, each child needed extra help or supervision in six areas of daily life. Cluster analysis indicated distinctive combinations of extra care needs. Qualitative material indicated variety in extra care tasks undertaken (physical help, supervision, guidance) and causal factors (physical limitations, cognitive difficulties, behavioural problems). The findings confirm that severely disabled children have considerable extra care needs in many areas of daily life. Parents want professionals to recognize and offer explicit acknowledgement of the extra care they give their disabled children.

Activities of Daily Living↗

PubMed1993

Sleep patterns in reading disabled children.

Sleep patterns in reading disabled (n = 24) and normal control (n = 15) 8-10-year-old boys were compared to examine suggested relationships among sleep, maturational and cognitive processes. Sleep was recorded in the laboratory for four consecutive nights (two adaptation, two baseline) using standard polysomnography. Analyses revealed variations across nights for both groups reflecting adaptation to the sleep laboratory, but such effects were attenuated in reading disabled subjects. Group comparisons on baseline sleep measures (nights 3 and 4 collapsed) revealed that reading disabled children showed significantly more stage 4 sleep, less rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, a longer REM onset latency and, related to this, an extended initial non-REM (NREM) cycle. Chronic sleep deprivation and maturational delay are prominent among factors that could result in such variations in sleep architecture, and these factors, alone or in combination, could impair information processing and contribute to cognitive deficits noted in reading disabled children.

Child↗

PubMed1983

Powered mobility for very young disabled children.

Nine motor-disabled children with normal intelligence and varying degrees of disability were studied to see if competent control of a motorized wheelchair is attainable between 20 and 39 months of age. Each child used a conventional motorized wheelchair with adaptive seating. Parents supervised the learning at home. Eight children drove safely and independently within 1.7 to 12 hours accumulated over a one to seven week period. Parents reported that this independent mobility stimulated their child's social, emotional and intellectual behavior.

Child, Preschool↗

PubMed1996

Attention factors mediating syntactic deficiency in reading-disabled children.

Syntactic context effects on the identification of spoken words, and the involvement of attention in mediating these effects, were examined in seventh-grade children with reading disabilities and children who were good readers. The subjects were asked to identify target words that were masked by white noise. All targets were final words embedded in unveiled sentences. Relative to a syntactically neutral context, the identification of targets whose morpho-syntactic structure was congruent with the context was facilitated and the identification of syntactically incongruent targets was inhibited. Reading-disabled children were less inhibited by syntactic incongruence than good readers. Presenting congruent and incongruent sentences in separate blocks reduced the amount of inhibition in good readers while having no effect on the reading-disabled. The percentage of correct identification of incongruent targets in the mixed presentation condition was larger for reading-disabled than for good readers, whereas in the blocked presentation condition the percentage of correct identification was equal across groups. The amount of facilitation was not affected by blocking the congruent and incongruent conditions, and was equal across reading groups. It is concluded that, in both reading groups, the syntactic structure of the context triggers a process of anticipation for particular syntactic categories which is based on a basic assumption that linguistic messages are syntactically coherent. Reading-disabled children are, however, less aware of this process and therefore less affected when the syntactic expectations are not fulfilled.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1996

Memory for Relevant and Irrelevant Information: Evidence for Deficient Inhibitory Processes in Language/ Learning Disabled Children

The present study examined whether language/learning disabled children have greater difficulty than nondisabled children suppressing information that becomes irrelevant during a sentence processing and memory task. During study trials, children were asked to predict and remember the terminal nouns for a series of sentences that highly constrained a terminal noun. For half of the study trials (fillers) the child's prediction was confirmed by presenting the child with the expected ending (e.g., "Butterflies fly by flapping their . . . wings."). For the remaining study trials (critical trials), however, the sentence ending expected by the child was disconfirmed with a low-probability ending (target noun). Thus, when presented with the sentence, "We made a sandwich with peanut butter and . . . ," the child's prediction ("jelly") was disconfirmed with a different ending ("bananas"). Memory for the disconfirmed and target nouns of critical study trials were subsequently tested implicitly with a new sentence-completion task. In this case, memory for disconfirmed and target nouns that had been associated with individual study sentences were measured in terms of priming effects. The analysis of priming effects indicated that language/learning disabled children experienced greater difficulty than nondisabled children inhibiting the activation of irrelevant information (disconfirmed nouns) and sustaining the activation of relevant information (target nouns) during a verbal memory task. These results were discussed in terms of their implications for some of the memory and language difficulties of language/learning disabled children.

Journal Article↗

PubMed1985

Signs of neurobehavioral dysfunction in a sample of learning disabled children: stability and concurrent validity.

Of 270 learning disabled children with average intelligence and significant delays in reading comprehension a sample of 37 were evaluated for signs of neurobehavioral dysfunction. All such signs--primitive reflexes, equilibrium reactions, and postrotary nystagmus--were reliably assessed. A subsample of 19 children was compared with developmentally normal and mentally retarded samples for the occurrence of tonic neck reflexes and equilibrium reactions. The learning disabled children consistently showed deviancies like those of the retarded children; both of these groups differed from the normal children on most measures. These deviant responses persisted over a 9-mo. period for the learning disabled group. Compared with norms, the total learning disabled sample displayed hyponystagmus, and this depressed nystagmus persisted for 11 mo. Results are discussed in relation to the lack of correlation among the various signs of neurobehavioral dysfunction in the learning disabled children.

Achievement↗

PubMed1982

Learning disabled children's syntactic proficiency on a communicative task.

Previous studies have generally examined learning disabled children's syntactic ability either on structured tasks or by analyzing oral language samples collected under conditions not typical of natural communicative settings. Thus, these studies are of limited value in exploring the impact of learning disabled children's deficits in linguistic structure on their use of language in social contexts. The purpose of this study was to investigate learning disabled children's syntactic proficiency during a task requiring them to convey information to a listener. Subjects were selected on the bases of teacher ratings, reading achievement scores, and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test IQ scores within the normal range; those children identified as learning disabled received low ratings and demonstrated underachievement (below 40th percentile for their grade) in reading. Oral language samples were collected by having learning disabled and normally achieving children in grades two, four, six, and eight participate in a referential communication task in which they described abstract shapes to an experimenter. The length and syntactic complexity of the children's descriptions were assessed. Learning disabled children in all grades were found to produce shorter mean t-units and shorter mean main clauses than nondisabled children even on this relatively simple communicative task. Although learning disabled children's linguistic problems have previously been characterized as subtle, these findings suggest that their productive language deficits may be significant enough to interfere with even the informal and elliptical conversations characteristic of communication among peers and family members.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1986

Evoked potential maps in learning disabled children.

Some childhood learning disabilities are associated with altered synchrony patterns of brain evoked potentials. Scalp recorded electrical synchrony between selected brain regions was measured in response to visual, auditory and somatosensory stimuli and compared between a group of learning disabled children and a group of normal children. Statistically significant inter-group differences revealed stimulus dependent greater inter-regional EP synchrony in the learning disabled group. These findings support the notion that some childhood learning disabilities reflect, in part, altered connections between selected brain regions.

Brain Mapping↗

PubMed1991

Tactile discrimination, response mode, and interhemispheric communication by learning disabled children.

32 right-handed, learning disabled children aged 8-10 yr., 11-13 yr., and 14-16 yr. were presented a tactile discrimination task. Pairs of fabrics of different or the same texture were presented to the same hand (uncrossed condition) or alternating hands (crossed condition). Discrimination errors were compared using a verbal response mode and a nonverbal response mode. Analysis indicated that the number of crossed errors was significantly greater in the verbal response mode than in the nonverbal response mode for only the youngest children. These results suggest selective attention-activation bias and/or hemispheric processing limitations for younger learning disabled children.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1980

Excessive postrotary nystagmus duration in learning-disabled children.

The Southern California Sensory Integration Test results of 109 learning-disabled children were reviewed and analyzed to investigate the hypothesis that learning-disabled children with excessive postrotary nystagmus durations display greater neuropsychological impairment than learning-disabled children with normal or depressed postrotary nystagmus. The findings supported the hypothesis that learning-disabled children judged to have relatively greater neuropsychological involvement exhibited significantly longer postrotary nystagmus durations. Data analysis revealed that six Southern California Sensory Integration Tests assumed to measure cortical level functions shared significant variance with excessive Southern California Postrotary Nystagmus Test (SCPNT) scores. A similar relationship was not found for normal or depressed SCPNT scores. A connection between cortical level versus brain-stem level central nervous system dysfunction, nystagmus, and learning disorder is discussed.

Child↗

PubMed1985

Mental rotation and visual laterality in normal and reading disabled children.

Normal and reading disabled children, aged from 11 to 13 years and matched for I.Q., were timed as they discriminated bs from ds. When the letters were presented only in their normal upright orientations, normal readers responded more quickly when they were presented in the right than in the left visual hemifield, while the disabled readers showed a slight but insignificant left hemifield advantage. When the letters were presented in varying angular orientations the reaction times indicated that both groups "mentally rotated" an internal representation of each letter to the upright in order to discriminate them. The two groups did not differ in the accuracy of discrimination or in the estimated rate of mental rotation, and there were no significant hemifield differences in this phase of the experiment. These data offer no support for the view that disabled readers are deficient in spatial ability, but confirm earlier evidence that they may suffer a lack of left-hemispheric specialization.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1985

Information processing and speech lateralization in learning-disabled children.

The relationship between information processing and speech lateralization was investigated in learning-disabled children. The Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC) assessed simultaneous and successive processing while a dichotic listening paradigm with free recall and directed attention conditions assessed speech lateralization. A three-factor ANOVA design conducted on the dichotic data revealed that normal children demonstrated stronger right ear advantage (REA); whereas learning-disabled showed weaker right ear advantage. Further, lambda analyses conducted on individual subjects revealed that the learning-disabled did not demonstrate the REA, were not biased attenders, and did not get more right ear than left ear items when attention was directed to one ear. Multiple-regression analysis was used to predict sequential processing from the dichotic data for both groups. Learning-disabled children demonstrated a substantial deficit in sequential processing as compared to normal children. These results indicate that learning-disabled children may not have adequate cerebral lateralization of receptive speech processes, shift their attention more readily, and are more inadequate in sequential processing that presumably subserves language functioning. Perhaps learning-disabled children have deficiencies of processor capacity of salient areas of the left (language) hemisphere.

Attention↗