Types of Learning Disabilities
Learning disabilities is a medical umbrella term for multiple learning disorders. Dysgraphia is a specific learning disability that affects motor and handwriting skills. Dysgraphic person experiences difficulty in converting thoughts and ideas into drawing or writing. Children suffer in translating critical thinking, memory, vocabulary, grammar, and spelling into writing. Dysgraphia signs include poor letter spacing and trouble with motor planning. Dyslexia is another disorder that impacts comprehension, writing, and reading. Dyslexic people experience difficulty in identifying and decoding words. It reduces phonemic awareness and often goes diagnosed. Dyslexia results in language, reading, and grammar troubles.
Dyscalculia is a learning disability that impairs the abilities related to mathematical calculations. It is referred to as math dyslexia because of its impact on reasoning, number, and math concepts. Dyscalculic individual experiences difficulty in solving mental math, remembering mathematical facts, counting money, and reading clocks. Dysgraphia, dyslexia, and dyscalculia are the common learning disabilities among children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Nonverbal learning disabilities (NVLD) refer to the inability to speak. A person with NVLD finds it tough to understand body language, facial expressions, and conversational tone. It is associated with nonverbal communication aspects. Visual perceptual learning disability impairs hand-eye coordination. It makes it hard to handle fine motor activities with scissors, glue, crayons, and pencils. Children with visual perceptual disabilities exhibit unusual eye activity during reading assignments.
Causes of Learning Disabilities
Learning disability is due to brain operational aberration that leads to abnormal information processing. It makes it difficult to achieve basic learning tasks. Some people develop learning disabilities from a genetic predisposition. However, heredity plays a salient role in passing factors triggering learning disabilities. For example, a child is likely to get a learning disorder if parents have had a disability. Experts ascertain that learning disability is devoid of a specific or single causative factor. Multiple variations are capable of causing learning disorders. Injury or illness during or after birth may stimulate learning disability. For example, stress, poor nutrition, or head injury during infancy significantly impacts brain development. Dyslexia is due to premature birth, fetal exposure to nicotine, a family history of dyslexia, and low birth weight.
Dysgraphia is a neurological learning disorder that arises from orthographic coding problems. Any working memory dysfunction eventually results in the appearance of dysgraphia among children. Adults suffer from dysgraphia due to brain injury or stroke. Injury or damage to the left parietal brain lobe is the leading cause of dysgraphia. Dyscalculia is mainly related to genes or heredity, unlike dysgraphia. It is the neural connection dysfunction that is responsible for processing numeric language. At least one parent of the dyscalculic child might show trouble learning math. Studies ascertain that maternal exposure to drugs and alcohol elevates the learning disability risk. Other possible learning disability causes are memory dysfunction, psychomotor alterations, and neurological maturation disorders.
