Ricerc@Sapienza

Difficulties in learning to read, write or do mathematics are referred to as "specific" disturbances since they occur in the absence of deficits in general cognitive skills (intelligence) and neurological disorders, and in spite of regular attendance to school activities. However, focusing on the specificity of these deficits neglects the presence of widespread co-morbidities among learning disturbances as well as with other developmental disturbances.
Co-morbidity represents a key issue both theoretically and clinically in the evaluation of developmental disorders. From a theoretical standpoint, it seems clear that a complex pattern of cognitive patterns can be associated to a variable pattern of co-morbidities spanning across both learning disorders and other key developmental disorders. Current cognitive models focus on a single deficit approach thereby failing to account for the partial overlap among developmental deficits. From a clinical standpoint, to draw a diagnostic profile of children, it becomes crucial to exploit the full profile of cognitive strengths and weaknesses of the child. Information on typical patterns of co-morbidities is therefore crucial to plan a diagnostic evaluation and, following, to plan individually tailored rehabilitation interventions.
In the present project, we aim to develop a proximal model of the factors which would jointly account for reading, writing and doing mathematics. To this aim, we plan to examine these behaviors in an unselected group of Italian children attending fifth grade and test them with a large set of possible cognitive predictors. This will allow to establish the best models to predict unique and shared portions of variance across reading, writing and doing mathematics.