Neuropsychological profile in italian learning disabled children

The heterogeneity of Learning Disabilities (LD) led to hypothesize a multifactorial genesis of the disorder. Besides phonological processing difficulties, other neuropsychological/cognitive skills are involved to define type and severity of difficulties, with a different significance according to the relationship between spoken and written language and the writing modalities. Our purpose was to delineate the neuropsychological profile (language, meta-phonological, visual- spatial, praxis skills and cognitive level) of 300 Italian children with LD evaluated at our Department in the last five years. The results shown lexical poorness, difficulties in narrative organization and in inferential comprehension, fine motor deficits that can be associated with bad writing or dysgraphia. The frequent presence of a discrepancy between Performance and Verbal Intelligence Quotient is confirmed. All these features are individually present in different subgroups of subjects, with some overlaps. The relationship between neuropsychological/cognitive falls and type of difficulties in learning is not entirely unique and requires further studies