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The Impact of Adults' Communication Clarity Versus Communication Deviance on Adolescents with Learning Disabilities

John D. Shields is a psychologist practicing in San Francisco and Orinda, California, where he conducts psychotherapy and psychological assessment and consults on legal cases involving psychological issues and psychological testimony. He is currently the director of consulting services at the California Institute of Psychology, San Francisco. His research and clinical interests include learning disabilities, forensic psychology, and psychoanalytic theory and practice. Address: John D. Shields, California Institute of Psychology, 476 Jackson St., San Francisco, CA 94111.

Robert J. Green, PhD

Robert-Jay Green is a professor of psychology and area coordinator of the Family-Child Psychology Program at the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP) in Alameda, California. He is also a practicing clinical psychologist and consultant at The Redwood Center in Berkeley, California. His research interests include family and couples therapy process and outcome, children at risk for psychotherapy and underachievement, male gender roles and family interaction, and clinical and research applications of the California Inventory for Family Assessment.

Bruce A. B. Cooper, PhD

Bruce A. B. Cooper is an associate professor in the clinical psychology program at CSPP-Alameda. His areas of research interest include the development of infants born at high risk due to very low birthweight and/or prematurity, high-risk children placed in foster care, foster parents and other caretakers of high-risk children, neuropsychological functioning of male felons, personality assessment, relations between Rorschach and MMPI variables, stress and coping, and quantitative methods in clinical research.

Patricia Ditton, PhD

Patricia Ditton is an associate at the Redwood Center in Berkeley where she engages in clinical practice and supervises postdoctoral interns. She is also a counselor and consulting psychologist for the Pleasanton Unified School District in Pleasanton, California.

Research has demonstrated that confusing styles of parental communication—"communication deviances" (CD)—are associated with cognitive disorder in offspring. The present study examined the immediate effects of adult communication clarity versus deviance on sixty-one 11- to 15-year-old male and female adolescents with learning disabilities (LD). Subjects were randomly assigned to complete the Rorschach Arrangement Task (RorAT) under conditions of either clear (n = 30) or unclear (n = 31) instructions from an adult. Immediately thereafter, the adolescents were administered a test of abstract thinking–-The Twenty Questions Task (TQT). Strategies used to solve the task were assessed. As hypothesized, adolescents in the clear communication condition performed significantly better on the RorAT and used more efficient cognitive strategies on the TQT than did adolescents in the unclear communication condition. A new theory with implications for teaching and parenting is proposed for understanding the influence of adult communication on students with LD.

Journal of Learning Disabilities, Vol. 28, No. 6, 372-384 (1995)
DOI: 10.1177/002221949502800608


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