Non-Verbal Skills

As described above, LKS causes a significant impairment of language skills, usually in terms of both understanding and speaking. Although verbal abilities are probably our most obvious set of skills, each individual also possesses a range of other ‘cognitive’ abilities contributing to their intelligence, often referred to as non-verbal or ‘performance’ skills. As the name suggests, these underlie our nonverbal understanding of the world and in children they include skills such as visual matching, drawing, design and construction, geometry, and mathematical problem solving. These non-verbal abilities may be assessed using a variety of different psychometric tests or intelligence tests. Depending on the child’s age these may include tasks such as inset puzzles or jigsaw puzzles, drawing and copying, and ‘block design’ (constructing a geometric pattern from coloured blocks). Accurate assessment of these skills can be very difficult, however, if the child’s motor skills and/or attention and concentration have been affected.

As a general rule, non-verbal skills are relatively spared by LKS, that is, there is often some impairment, but usually this is less severe than the language deficits (and sometimes there is no measurable impairment at all). This has important implications for the child’s education (see the school section), as it is important to continue to use these preserved visuo-spatial skills in order to optimise their development long-term, and also to boost self-esteem at a time when many of the child’s abilities have been taken away from them. A more severe impairment of non-verbal abilities is sometimes seen, however; that is, equivalent severity to the language impairment, such that there is an even or ‘global’ pattern of delay in the child’s development. The clinical impression is that this picture predominantly affects children in whom there has been an early onset of LKS. Where there has been some significant impairment of non-verbal abilities associated with LKS regression, they are often the first to recover once the child starts to make gains again.

Some specific strategies for supporting children with this pattern of difficulties are set out in the Useful Teaching Approaches section.