"Being learning disabled is like being in a dark room full of obstacles where everyone except you has a flashlight."  Anonymous.

"Imagine having important needs and ideas to communicate, but being unable to express them. Perhaps feeling bombarded by sights and sounds, unable to focus your attention. Or trying to read or add but not being able to make sense of the letters or numbers." National Institute for Mental Health.

Learning disabled children and adults often think, or are told, that they are stupid.  You may have been told that you are stupid.  You may have been called a dummy in school or by peers. 

Now listen:  YOU ARE NOT STUPID!

Being learning disabled does not mean that you are stupid,  it means that the way other people hear, see, and process information is different than yours. In school, teachers work with learning styles that are most common to their students. You have a different learning style than your classmates and your friends, even your brothers and sisters. If you have trouble learning at school, then your teachers have not taken the time to discover your learning style, the learning style that works best for you.

• Developmental Speech and Language Disorders:  Speech and language problems are often the earliest indicators of a learning disability. People with developmental speech and language disorders have difficulty producing speech sounds, using spoken language to communicate, or understanding what other people say. These Developmental Speech and Language Disorders can be grouped into one of three smaller categories. 

• Developmental Articulation Disorder -  Articulation disorder relates to the inability to articulate or vocalize or speak sounds correctly.  Children  with this disorder may have trouble controlling their rate of speech.  Or, they may lag behind playmates in learning to make speech sounds.  For example, saying the word "wabbit" instead of "rabbit."  Developemental articulation disorders are common.  They appear in at least 10 percent of children younger than age 8.  Fortunately, articulation disorders can often be outgrown or successfully treated with speech treatment.

• Developmental Expressive Language Disorder -Expressive disorder relates to difficulties expressing or communicating one's thoughts to another person.  Some children with language impairments have problems expressing themselves in speech.  A child who often calls objects by the wrong names may have an expressive language disorder.  Or, a 4-year old who speaks only in two-words phrases and a 6-year old who can't answer simple questions may also have an expressive language disorder.   

• Developmental Receptive Language Disorder -  Receptive disorder relates to difficulties receiving and processing the language information around us (the things we read or hear).  Some children have trouble understanding certain aspects of speech.  It's like their brains are set to a different frequency and the reception is poor.  They may hear the sounds of speech, but for some reason those sounds don't mean the same to them as to you and I.  There's a toddler who doesn't respond to his name; a preschooler who hands you a bell when you ask for a ball; or a worker who consistently cannot follow simple directions.  Their hearing may be fine, but they can't make sense of certain sounds, words, or sentences they hear.  They may seem inattentive.  Because using and understanding speech are strongly related, many people with receptive language disorders also have an expressive language disorder.

• Academic Skills Disorders: Students with academic skills disorders are often years behind their classmates in developing reading, writing, or arithmetic skills.   There are three major diagnoses categories. 

• Developmental Reading Disorder -  This type of disorder is also known as dyslexia (pronounced “dis-lex-ee-ah”), and is quite widespread. Reading disabilities affect 2 to 8 percent of elementary school children. Let’s look for a moment at the skills that you must use all at the same time in order to be able to read.

• Focus attention on the printed marks and control eye movement across the page.

• Recognize the sounds associated with the letters.

• Understand words and grammar.

• Build ideas and images.

• Compare new ideas to what you already know.

• Store ideas in memory.

If any one of these skills is missing or weak, that can affect the ability to read and understand information.  The mental juggling required to accomplish all of these skills at the same time requires an intact network of nerve cells that connect the brain’s centers of vision, language, and memory.

A person can have problems in any of the tasks involved in reading. However, scientists have found that a significant number of people with dyslexia share an inability to distinguish or separate the sounds in spoken words.

Some children with dyslexia cannot identify the word “bat” by sounding out the letters b-a-t. Other children have trouble with rhyming and cannot rhythm “cat” with “bat.” We do know that these skills are all necessary to learning to read.  Professionals and specialists have developed techniques that can help many children with dyslexia acquire these skills.

However, there is more to reading than recognizing words.  If the brain is unable to form images or relate new ideas to those stored in memory, then reader can't understand or remember the new concepts.  So other types of reading disabilities can appear in the upper grades when the focus of reading shifts from word identification to comprehension.

• Developmental Writing Disorder - Writing, too, involves several brain areas and functions.  The brain networks for vocabulary, grammar, hand movement, and memory must all be in good working order.  So a developmental writing disorder may result from problems in any of these areas.  For example, a elementary school child who is unable to distinguish the sequence of sounds in a word, had problems with spelling.  A child with a writing disability, particularly an expressive language disorder, might be unable to compose complete, grammatical sentences. 

• Developmental Arithmetic Disorder -  If you doubt that arithmetic is a complex process, think of the steps you take to solve this simple problem:  What is 24 divided into 3 equal parts?

Arithmetic involves recognizing numbers, and understanding abstract concepts like place value and fractions.  Any of these may be difficult for children with developmental arithmetic disorders.  Problems with numbers or basic concepts are likely to show up early.  Disabilities that appear in the later grades are more often tied to problems in reasoning.

Many aspects of speaking, listening, reading, writing, and arithmetic overlap and build on the same brain capabilities.  So, it's not surprising that people can be diagnosed as having more than one area of learning disability.  For example, the ability to understand language underlies learning to speak.. Therefore, any disorder that hinders the ability to understand language will also interfere with the development of speech, which in turn hinders learning to read and write.  A single gap in the brain's operation can disrupt many types of activity.