This study explored the relationship between parents' communication deviances and children's placement in a learning disability class. Participants were the parents of 30 learning-disabled students and 30 average students attending junior high school. Samples of communication were taken from parents' participation in an experimental task. Using a "blind" sorting procedure, raters were able to identify 87% of the learning-disabled students' parents by their high communication deviance scores and 77% of the average students' parents by their low communication deviance scores on the experimental communication task (p less than or equal to .0001). Implications for future research on the etiology and remediation of learning disabilities are discussed.

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.