Learning Disability > Nonverbal Learning Disabilities (NLD)

Children with this disorder are unable to recognize and translate nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions or tone of voice, into meaningful information. This cause the children to be mislabeled as emotionally disturbed because of their inappropriate responses to nonverbal stimuli. It is a neurological disorder, which originates in the right hemisphere of the brain, causing problems with visual-spatial, intuitive, organizational, evaluative, and holistic processing functions. Nonverbal learning disabilities can be tricky to recognize and diagnose. The neuropsychological characteristics of individuals with the NLD profile include deficits in tactile perception, psychomotor coordination, visual-spatial organization, nonverbal problem solving, and appreciation of incongruities and humor. Children with NLD also exhibit well-developed rote verbal capacities and verbal memory skills. They however face difficulty in adapting to novel and complex situations, and over reliance on rote behaviors in such situations, relative deficits in mechanical arithmetic as compared to proficiencies in single word reading, poor pragmatics and prosody in speech, and significant deficits in social perception, social judgment, and social interaction skills. There are marked deficits in the appreciation of subtle and even fairly obvious nonverbal aspects of communication, that often result in other person's social disdain and rejection. As a result, NLD individuals show a marked tendency toward social withdrawal and are at risk for development of serious mood disorders.