A sample of 55 school-identified learning-disabled (LD) children were subdivided into six perceptual and linguistic subtypes using hierarchical clusteranalysis techniques. The classification battery included measures of visual perception, sequential processing, perceptual/motor ability, linguistic comprehension, language production, and semantics. Two subtypes (33%) presented normal profiles and a third (18%) was normal appearing but contained some children with marginal performance. Three distinctive patterns of learning disabilities were found, representing a specific language disability (27%) and two variations of mixed perceptual and linguistic deficits (21%). Assessment of achievement over a 3-year period showed that the language-impaired subtype and those with mixed perceptual/linguistic deficits had poorer outcomes than the normal-appearing subtypes, who in turn, made less progress than randomly selected classmates from the same mainstream classrooms.
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