Handwriting difficulties in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Verbal working-memory load—not spatial—slows handwriting and worsens legibility in ADHD, so reduce verbal dual-task demands during writing.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Capodieci et al. (2018) asked kids with ADHD to copy a sentence three ways. One time they just wrote. One time they wrote while remembering a string of numbers. One time they wrote while remembering a pattern of dots.
The team timed every letter and scored legibility. They wanted to know which extra load—verbal or spatial—hurt writing most.
What they found
Only the verbal load slowed the kids down and made letters messy. When numbers had to stay in mind, speed dropped and legibility dipped. The dot pattern did almost nothing.
In plain words, talking inside the head while writing is the problem, not pictures.
How this fits with other research
Shen et al. (2012) and Gomot et al. (2011) already showed ADHD kids write slower and messier. Agnese narrows the cause to verbal working memory, not general motor trouble.
Wang et al. (2025) found the same handwriting hit in kids who also have dyslexia. Their bigger drop fits Agnese’s idea that verbal load is the key choke point.
Lemel et al. (2023) saw spoken-word processing slow under verbal load in adults with ADHD. Agnese shows the same bottleneck hits handwriting in kids. One mechanism, two modalities.
Why it matters
Cut the chatter while kids write. Turn off instructional audio, skip oral dictation, and let them write in silence first. Save verbal tasks for after the pencil is down.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Handwriting is fundamental in school and everyday life situations. Legibility guarantees that writing productions communicate information, and speed is often crucial, especially in children with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), in order to increase the likelihood of their being able to work efficiently and stay on-task during school activities. Preliminary reports have shown an impairment in handwriting of children with ADHD, but evidence is still unclear, especially in the case of speed where research has offered contradictory results. Children's performance, furthermore, has yet to be investigated under the cognitive loading conditions typical of academic tasks in classroom. To shed light on this matter, we examined the handwriting performance in a simple condition but also under (verbal or spatial) working memory (WM) load in 16 fourth- and fifth-grade children with symptoms of ADHD and 16 matched control children. Our results showed that the groups speed differed significantly only in the verbal WM loading condition, where children with symptoms of ADHD wrote more slowly and showed a greater intra-individual variability than controls. Handwriting legibility was affected by verbal WM loading too. These findings are discussed in relation to their educational and clinical implications.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2018 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2018.01.003