Reading and spelling deficits among children attending a psychiatric day treatment program

To investigate the specific behavioural and cognitive characteristics which may account for academic deficits in children with psychiatric disorders, 50 children admitted to a day treatment and school program were assessed using behaviour questionnaires for parents and teachers, and tests assessing intelligence (WISC-R), language (CELF-R) and academic performance (Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement). The academic measures Reading Decoding, Reading Comprehension and Spelling formed the dependent variables. Behaviour and cognitive measures which distinguished the sample from normative data constituted the independent variables. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were performed in order to identify behaviour and cognitive measures accounting for the academic deficits. In the analyses, three measures (Digit Span, Sentence Assembly, Recalling Sentences), probably assessing overlapping cognitive/linguistic functions, accounted for a large proportion of variance for Reading Decoding (0.47), Reading Comprehension (0.63) and Spelling (0.29). None of the behaviour measures accounted for any variance of the academic variables. It is argued that linguistic dysfunction is a primary deficit which underlies problems in academic learning.