Learning disabilities can be identified through various symptoms that manifest in different combinations in children, irrespective of their intelligence, motivation, and hard work for learning.

First, difficulties in writing letters, words and phrases, reading out text, and speaking appear quite frequently. These children often have listening problems, although they may not have auditory defects. They are very different from others in developing learning strategies and plans.

Second, learning-disabled children have disorders of attention. They get easily distracted and cannot sustain attention on one point for long. Their attentional deficiency often leads to hyperactivity, where they are always moving, doing different things, and trying to manipulate things incessantly.

Third, such children show poor space orientation and inadequate sense of time. They do not get easily oriented to new surroundings and get lost. They also show confusion in direction and misjudge right, left, up and down. Additionally, they have poor motor coordination and poor manual dexterity, evident in their lack of balance and inability to handle simple tasks.

Fourth, learning-disabled children usually show perceptual disorders including visual, auditory, tactual, and kinesthetic misperception. A fairly large number have dyslexia – they fail to distinguish between letters like b and d, p and q, and fail to organise verbal materials. They also fail to understand and follow oral directions and misjudge social relationships.