4.
OUTPUT DISABILITIES
Information
comes out of the brain either by means of words--language
output--or through muscle activity, such as writing, drawing,
gesturing, and so forth--motor output. A child or adolescent
may have a language disability or motor disability.
Language
Disability
Two forms of language are used in communication, spontaneous
language and demand language. You use spontaneous
language in situations where you initiate whatever is said.
Here you have the luxury of picking the subject and taking
some time to organize your thoughts and to find the correct
words before you say anything. In a demand language situation,
someone else sets up a circumstance in which you must communicate.
A question is put to you, for example. Now you have no time
to organize your thoughts or find the right words; you have
only a split second in which you must simultaneously organize,
find words, and answer more or less appropriately.
Children
with a specific language disability usually have
no difficulty with spontaneous language. They do, however,
often have problems with demand language. The inconsistency
can be quite striking. A youngster may initiate all sorts
of conversation, may never keep quiet, in fact, and may
sound quite normal. But put into a situation that demands
a response, the same child might answer "Huh?"
or "What?" or "I don't know." Or the
child may ask you to repeat the question to gain time, or
not answer at all. If the child is forced to answer, the
response may be so confusing or so circumstantial that it
is difficult to follow. She or he may sound totally unlike
the child who was speaking so fluently just a minute ago.
This inconsistency or confusion in language behavior often
puzzles parents and teachers. A teacher might put a child
down as lazy or negative because he or she does well when
volunteering to speak or answer a question, but won't answer
or says "I don't know" when called on. The explanation
could lie in the child's inability to handle demand language,
but contradictory behavior like this makes sense only if
you know about the disability.
Motor Disabilities
If a child has difficulty in using large muscle groups,
this is called a gross motor disability.
Difficulty in performing tasks that require many muscles
to work together in an integrated way is called a fine
motor disability.
Gross motor disabilities can cause your
child to be clumsy, to stumble, to fall, to bump into things,
or to have trouble with generalized physical activities
like running, climbing, or swimming.
The most common form of fine motor disability
shows up when the child begins to write. The problem lies
in an inability to get the many muscles in the dominant
hand to work together as a team. Children and adolescents
with this "written language" disability have slow
and poor handwriting. A typical expression of this problem
is, "My hand doesn't work as fast as my head is thinking."
Watch your own hand as you write something and notice the
many detailed fine muscle activities that it takes to write
legibly. Writing requires a constant flow of such activities.
Now place your pen in your non-dominant hand and try to
write. If you go very slowly, it is tedious but your handwriting
is legible. If you go at a regular pace, however, your hand
aches and your handwriting deteriorates immediately. Shape,
size, spacing, positioning--everything about it looks awful
no matter how hard you try. A child with fine motor disability
goes through this all the time.
When a child has a visual perceptual problem, the brain,
which has incorrectly recorded or processed information,
will probably misinform the muscles during activities that
require eye-hand coordination. This is referred to as a
visual motor disability.
