GUIDELINESFORSCHOOL

Nonverbal learning disorders appear much less than language based learning disabilities. The symptoms are different, but can be noticed quite early in the child’s development.

First of all it manifests itself in lack of psychomotor coordination, sometimes the child makes verbal comments for the nonverbal activities, trying to spontaneously help himself.

The verbal abilities is a strong part of these students, but there are some weaknesses in this part too: despite the fluency in spoken language it misses “the point”, these children are not sensitive to the reactions of other people to their speech, they are too focused on details and experience difficulties in seeing the whole picture, they have quite good factual knowledge because of the ability to memorise, but it is difficult for them to apply their knowledge to new situations, to generalise, to solve problems.

This is why these children have difficulties in mathematics. The more abstract, the more complicated the learning material is the more evident becomes their inability to cope with the learning tasks. Having the experience of failure, they often demonstrate emotional problems.

Their perception of language is also too literal, which causes misunderstandings about the intentions of other people towards them. Sometimes these children, due to their shortcomings in social functioning, may become the targets for bullying. Because of lack of sensitivity to nonverbal clues, too concrete and straightforward communication these children may experience difficulties in establishing and maintaining friendships. So usually children with nonverbal learning disorders have few friends around.