Acta Psychologica Sinica


Vol. 35 No. 5 , Pages 604 - 609 , 2003

Developmental Coordination Disorder and Dysgraphia: A Case Study (Article written in chinese)

MENG Xiangzhi, ZHOU Xiaolin, & WU Jiayin

Abstract

This study examined the cognition and motor skills in a 14-year-old boy with severe writing difficulties. This case, zl wrote very slowly, his handwriting was bad and hard to be recognized. The study showed that his intelligence, reading comprehension and listening comprehension were normal. There were no differences between zl’s performance on accuracy of naming single characters, two-character words, numbers, and objects with that of same-aged controls. But his speed was significantly slower that that of the controls. This study focused on zl’s fine motor, visual-spatial, visual, and sequential processing skills. The results showed that his visual memory, sequential processing abilities and motion detection was normal. His motor skill, and visual-spatial were significantly worse than those of the controls. Neurophysiology examination found that his brain wave was abnormal, MRI scans indicated that myelinated corpus callosum and cerebellum developed abnormally. These findings suggested that zl’s writing difficulties reflected his general motor coordination disorders, and had neurophysiological foundations. The implications for cognitive neurology mechanism and early diagnosis of writing difficulties were discussed.

Keywords: developmental coordination disorder; writing difficulties; case study; visual-spatial processing; fine motor skills

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