Learning disabilities with communicative disorders as related handicaps: a two-year study.

This study presents a demographic profile of learning-disabilities children with communicative disorders as related handicaps, and attempts to determine the analytical impact of including these children with children manifesting communicative disorders as primary handicaps. The purpose of this investigation emerged as a result of problems stemming from current definitions of learning disabilities as they relate to speech--language pathology and audiology, and from unavailable data on communicative disorders as related handicaps. The findings indicate that 0.35% of the school population were learning-disabled with communicative disorders as secondary handicaps; these children represented 30.2% of the service delivery for communicative disorders. The white: black ratio of 1.8: 1 did not coincide with the population ratio; this finding was unfavorable for blacks. Sex and race were confounding variables, with sex as the stronger one. Further, the study indicated that service delivery for language disorders and males were greater than in other communicative disordered populations.