This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Re, A. M. Articles by Cornoldi, C. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Re, A. M. Articles by Cornoldi, C. Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Expressive Writing Difficulties in Children Described as Exhibiting ADHD Symptoms

University of Padova, Italy, annamaria.re{at}unipd.it

Martina Pedron

University of Padova

Cesare Cornoldi

University of Padova

Three groups of children of different ages who were considered by their teachers as showing symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and matched controls were tested in a series of expressive writing tasks, derived from a standardized writing test. In the first study, 24 sixth- and seventh-grade children with ADHD symptoms wrote a description of an image. The ADHD group's expressive writing was worse than that of the control group and associated with a higher number of errors, mainly concerning accents and geminates. The second study showed the generality of the effect by testing younger groups of children with ADHD symptoms and controls with another description task where a verbal description was substituted for the picture stimulus. The third study extended the previous observations with another type of writing task, the request of writing a narrative text. In all the three studies, children with ADHD symptoms scored lower than controls on four qualitative parameters (adequacy, structure, grammar, and lexicon), produced shorter texts, and made more errors. These studies show that children with ADHD symptoms have school difficulties also in writing—both in spelling and expression—and that these difficulties are extended to different tasks and ages.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				A. M. Re, M. Caeran, and C. Cornoldi Improving Expressive Writing Skills of Children Rated for ADHD Symptoms J Learn Disabil, November 1, 2008; 41(6): 535 - 544. [Abstract] [PDF]