Characteristics of Young Learning-Disabled Children Classified According to Patterns of Academic Achievement: Auditory-Perceptual and Visual-Perceptual Abilities

In this study, three 15-member groups of 7- to 8-year-old learning,disabled (LD) children, were composed as follows: Group 1 children exhibited evenly deficient performances on the Reading, Spelling, and Arithmetic subtests of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT); Group 2 children presented a pattern of deficient Reading and Spelling scores in conjunction with significantly higher, although impaired, Arithmetic scores on the WRAT; and Group 3 children exhibited average.or above-average performances on the Reading and Spelling subtests but performed in a significantly deficient manner on the Arithmetic subtest of the WRAT. The performances of these groups of children were compared on 10 auditory-perceptual/linguistic measures and on 6 visual-perceptual measures. Groups 1 and 2 consistently performed in an inferior manner on auditory-perceptual/linguistic measures in comparison to Group 3; Group 3 performed in a manner inferior to that of Group 1 and Group 2 on certain visual-perceptual measures. The relationship of the present findings to previous research designed to determine the neuropsychological abilities of these three subtypes of LD children is discussed.