Diagnostic Criteria

The environment is the most important support for people with NLD. When school and home are positive, safe and predictable, children with NLD can thrive and become independent and productive adults.

• Bilateral tactile-perceptual deficits
• Bilateral psycho-motor coordination deficits
• Outstanding deficiencies in visual-spatial-organizational abilities
• Deficits in the areas of nonverbal problem solving, concept formation, hypothesis testing
• Difficulty dealing with negative feedback in novel or complex situations
• Difficulties in dealing with cause-effect relationships
• Difficulties in the appreciation of incongruities
• Well-developed rote verbal capacities and rote verbal memory skills
• Over-reliance on prosaic rote, and consequently inappropriate, behaviors in unfamiliar situations
• Relative deficiencies in mechanical arithmetic as compared to proficiencies in reading (word recognition) and spelling
• Rote and repetitive verbosity
• Content disorders of language
• Poor psycholinguistic pragmatics (cocktail party speech)
• Poor speech prosody
• Reliance on language for social relating, information gathering, and relief from anxiety
• Misspelling almost exclusively of the phonetically accurate variety
• Significant deficits in social perception, social judgment, and social interaction skills
• Marked tendency for social withdrawal and isolation as age increases
• High risk for social-emotional disturbance if no appropriate intervention is undertaken

NLD is a syndrome of assets and deficits. In each individual with NLD, the assets and deficits manifest in different combinations and different intensities. Most people with the diagnosis, however, share the basic configuration of relative impairment in social perception, visual-spatial abilities, and mechanical arithmetic, with well developed verbal skills and rote memory.