Impact of tactile function on upper limb motor function in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder.
Poor touch-map accuracy on the non-dominant hand predicts slow, illegible handwriting in children with DCD.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tested kids with Developmental Coordination Disorder. They wanted to know if poor touch sense links to messy writing.
Each child pointed to where they felt a tiny poke on the hand. Then they copied a sentence and did a peg-board race.
What they found
Kids who missed the poke spot by a lot wrote slower and sloppier. The worse the touch error, the worse the writing grade.
Touch errors on the non-dominant hand predicted speed and legibility best.
How this fits with other research
Fleury et al. (2018) saw the same link in Chinese teens with autism. Manual dexterity, not touch spot, drove their writing speed. Together the papers say: check both touch and dexterity; one may matter more for DCD, the other for ASD.
Cohrs et al. (2017) found toddlers with global delay over-react to light touch. E et al. show older DCD kids under-map touch. Same delay, opposite tactile problem—age and task explain the gap.
Tsai et al. (2010) used brain waves to show DCD kids are slower at shifting attention. The new study adds that the body map itself is fuzzy, not just the speed of using it.
Why it matters
Before you drill more handwriting sheets, test single-point touch localization on the helper hand. A quick 30-second poke game can flag kids who need extra body-awareness work. Add tactile localization drills or sensorimotor warm-ups; they may save hours of frustration at the desk.
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Join Free →Put a sticker on the child’s non-dominant hand, lightly poke around it, and ask them to point to each poke—note misses, then add tactile localization games before writing tasks.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study investigated the presence of, and relationship between tactile dysfunction and upper limb motor function in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) compared to typical developing (TD) children. Participants were 36 children aged 6-12 years. Presence of DCD (n=20) or TD (n=16) was confirmed using the Movement Assessment Battery for Children, second edition. All children participated in a comprehensive assessment of tactile registration (Semmes Weinstein Monofilaments); tactile spatial perception (Single Point Localisation (SPL) and two-point discrimination (2PD)); haptic perception (Stereognosis); speed of simple everyday manual tasks (Jebsen-Taylor Test of Hand Function (JTTHF)); and handwriting speed and accuracy (Evaluation Tool of Children's Handwriting (ETCH)). Compared to TD children, children with DCD demonstrated poorer localisation of touch in the non-dominant hand (p=0.04), slower speed of alphabet writing (p<0.05) and less legible handwriting (p<0.01), but no difference in speed of simple everyday manual tasks (JTTHF: p>0.05). Regression analysis showed that spatial tactile perception (SPL) predicted handwriting legibility (ETCH: r=0.11) and speed of functional tasks (JTTHF: r=0.33). These results suggest that tactile function, specifically single point localisation, should be a primary tactile assessment employed to determine reasons for upper limb motor difficulties experienced by children with DCD.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2015 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2015.07.034