Learning Disability
A specific learning disability means a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, which may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical calculations.
The term includes such conditions as perceptual handicaps, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia.
The term does not include children who have problems that are primarily the result of visual, hearing, or motor disabilities, or mental retardation, emotional disturbance, or of environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage.
(Council for Exceptional Children)
Definitions of learning disability recognize a continuum from mild differences in performance to severe disabilities which affect all/most areas of schooling and include the following elements:
Examples of the more common learning disabilities include: visual-motor integration, motor planning, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, attention deficit disorder, retrieval, short term memory, spelling, auditory perception, auditory memory, auditory discrimination, figure ground (visual or auditory), auditory sequencing, intersensory, disinhibition, tactile perception, vestibular perception, depth perception.