Information perception and understanding in children with disabilities: characteristics, problems, and solutions

The article examines the features of perception and understanding of information in children with disabilities. It analyzes the main problems these children face in the process of receiving and processing information and proposes ways to address them. Special attention is given to the integration of pedagogical and speech therapy strategies for more effective development of communication skills and improved text comprehension in students. This approach allows combining teaching methods with corrective techniques, contributing to a more comprehensive and individualized development of speech and cognitive processes. The authors argue that when working with textual material, children with disabilities need to use techniques based not only on active reading methods, such as highlighting key words and phrases, formulating content-related questions, and creating diagrams and tables to structure information, but also on linguistic, non-linguistic, cultural, pragmatic, and inclusive approaches to text adaptation. These approaches help improve cognitive processes related to perception and information processing, as well as enhance the level of communicative and analytical skills in students with learning difficulties. This article presents the results of an empirical study examining the cognitive and perceptual characteristics of text comprehension in preschool and primary school-aged children in educational institutions in Tomsk (Tomsk Oblast, Russian Federation) and Grodno (Republic of Belarus). The experimental study included a comprehensive analysis of the mechanisms of adaptation to text stimuli, with an emphasis on identifying specific deficits due to individual differences in cognitive development and language skills. The authors systematized the identified deficits, classifying them into categories (e.g., phonemic, semantic, and pragmatic impairments), and proposed adaptive techniques for perceiving text information that take into account the specific perceptual processes of the study group.