Diagnostic Criteria
A. Expressive language ability, as measured by individually administered standardized tests, is substantially below that expected given the person's chronological age, measured intelligence, and age-appropriate education.
B. The disturbance in Criterion A significantly interferes with academic achievement or activities of daily living that require expressive language ability.
C. If a sensory deficit is present, the difficulties in expressive language ability are in excess of those usually associated with it.
The key feature to identifying someone with a learning disorder is an ability in writing that is lower than their general, average or overall abilities. If you could view an individuals skills on a scale from 0-10 in areas of learning, such as math, writing, reading, communication, etc – a learning disorder would be a score that is greatly lower than all of the other scores. For example for a reading learning disorder, if your average skills in other areas rate at an 8, and your reading skills rate at a 5 – it is likely that you have a learning disability of reading.
This disability, however, must cause the individual some disturbance in their life or some stress due to this lack of ability. It is important to note that learning disabilities cannot be controlled or improved simply by trying harder.
The exact cause of an Expressive language disorder is not known, however there are some major risk factors including:
There is no cure for learning disorders