Was wondering if people with experience in testing profiles of NVLD and RD could help me out a bit.
I’ve been diagnosed as severely ADHD at 25 after dropping out of a top university graduate program due to academic difficulties. Turns out everyone in my immediate family suffers from severe ADHD. The diagnosis seems to fit well, and I have responded well to medication and cognitive behavioral therapy.
But one of my primary problems has been with reading. I process it SO slowly compared to everything else. It’s hard to tell if that’s an issue with my mental hyperactivity (I speak and think so quickly that it’s hard even for me to keep up- I think that’s common in ADHD, right?) or if it’s a different processing issue. My reading comprehension and speed are pretty high when normed by age, but all of my WJ-III scores are pretty low considering I have undergrad and graduate education at a snobby Ivy-ish university. I do have serious reading comprehension issues with any kind of dense text.
I’ve been reading up a bit on reading disorders and NVLDs, and I’m wondering if it’s possible I have something along those lines going on?
-I do have motor coordination problems, and I did all as a child.
-I have zero ability to copy physical motions of others; especially if they’re facing me. My head just can’t seem to mentally position my own body in their place and figure out which direction they’re moving in.
-I constantly stumble during sight reading out loud, and I often misread simple words
-I don’t have a problem with math concepts (and in fact am quite good at a lot of math) as long as they don’t have a physical/spatial component. In the latter case, I can’t put the image in my mind to begin with, let alone manipulate it mentally. In the former, as long as I can transform it into either a logic problem or into a set of rules to remember, I’m usually quite good.
-I don’t recognize faces well at all; or people in general. I have a very difficult time with visual recognition, and I’m often in the embarrassing situation of staring at someone only a short distance away because it takes me so long to process their face and then try to match it up against a memory of another’s face: often I end up being completely unable to determine if someone I’m looking at is actually the person I think they are.
-I have no ability to judge distances at all by sight.
-My spelling is actually pretty bad. It took me years to learn how to spell “beautiful” (heh) There are many words I still can’t seem to remember how to spell or pronounce correctly.
-It took me a long time to learn left from right as a child
So those are some of the visual-spatial things going on. But how do I know that they’re not just attention issues coupled with a relatively weak (but not disabled) visual processing brain?
I went through a battery of tests for ADHD. I’ll paste them below. (I should note that the WAIS was taken on 5 hours sleep and hung over. It was taken for an experiment I didn’t really care about, and true to my ADHD, I demonstrated zero self-restraint the night before when a friend asked me if I wanted to go clubbing. It’s considered to be a poor representation of my abilities by my test-taker and the person who has done my clinical evaluation and treatment, but I can’t retake it for another 5 months)
Any thoughts?
WAIS-III:
VIQ: 127
PIQ: 116
FSIQ: 124
VCI: 124
POI: 109
WMI: 121
PSI: 121
Verbal Subtests:
Vocab: 17
Similarities: 11
Arithmetic: 15
Digit Span: 12
Information: 15
Comprehension: 15
Letter-Number Sequence: 14
Performance Subtests:
Picture Completion: 11
Digit Symbol: 16
Block Design: 12
Matrix Reasoning: 12
Picture Arrangement: 11
Symbol Search: 12
Woodcock-Johnson III (Standard Scores: Age)
Total Achievement: 127
Broad Reading: 124
Letter-Word Identification: 112
Reading Fluency: 123
Passage Comprehension: 112
Word Attack: 118
Broad Math: 119
Calculation: 114
Math Fluench: 121
Applied Problems: 114
Broad Written Language: 130
Spelling: 118
Writing Fluench: 127
Writing Samples: 132
Wechsler Memory Scale:
Logical Memory 1: 12
Logical Memory II: 9
(Note: Big divide on my scores. Detail-oriented questions I was in the 31st percentile or lower. Narrative memory I was in the 91st percentile)
California Verbal Learning Test-II Raw and (z scores)
Trial 1 = 7(0)
Trial 2 = 10(0)
Trial 3 = 8(-1.5)
Trial 4 = 10(-1.0)
Trial 5 = 10(-1.0)
Trials 1-5 Total T = 45
Trial B = 7(0)
Short Delay Free = 7(-1.5)
Short Delay Cue = 7(-1.5)
Long Delay Free = 7(-1.5)
Long Delay Cue = 8(-1.5)
Long-Delay Recognition Hits = 11(-3)
Long Delay Yes/No False Positives 4(1.0)
Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System:
Verbal Fluency:
Letter Fluency SS=16
Category Fluency SS =19
Category Switching (accuracy) SS=17
Category Switching (responses) SS=17
Trail Making
Visual Scannign SS=13
Number Sequencing SS=15
Letter Sequencing SS=13
Motor Speed SS=13
Nelson-Denny Reading Test
Vocab 78/92%
Comprehension 74/22
Total 152/93%
Reading Rate 312/80%
Also, why would my Coding, Arithmetic, and Letter-Number be so high while my CTVL and WMS be so low?