Portia is correct in observing that your verbal scores were much stronger than your performance (visual spatial, motor, nonverbal) scores. This can be associated with some kind of learning difference. It is, at a minimum, rare in the population.

The comment regarding focal weaknesses in word-level reading skills, but composite reading scores in the High Average range, suggests that your reading comprehension scores were likely more on a par with your verbal cognition, which is very much the profile of a high-functioning compensated dyslexic, powering through reading using intelligence, rather than fluent decoding skills. It is also somewhat consistent with NVLD, as you surmise, though typically I find that, by high school, math reasoning scores have slipped down much lower. Yours have not.

One of the factors that is a bit trickier to tease out at this late date is the impact of speed on your performance. On the WISC-III, all of the performance (labeled "nonverbal" here) subtests were timed. I don't think it was fine-motor speed necessarily, as the motor-free (but timed) task is in the same range as the hands-on tasks, and there does not appear to be a gradation in performance paralleling the complexity of motor requirements. So this suggests either a visual-perceptual factor (not necessarily motor) or a mental processing speed factor. Or a combination of the two.

You have two verbal outliers--one which is notably lower than your other verbal subtests (vocabulary), and one which is quite a bit higher than the others (comprehension). Typically, I see this in verbally strong students with a history of reading delays (such as yourself), who reason very well using the language one uses in everyday life, but have had less exposure to rich written language than expected for their cognition, because of the challenges of accessing text efficiently. Consequently, Comprehension, which is largely verbal social reasoning, is strong, but Vocabulary, which is specific academic language, is not as strong.

Another interesting note is the 10 scaled score difference between verbally-mediated social reasoning and visually-mediated social reasoning. For some individuals, this gap between articulating what should be done in social situations, and perceiving all of the subtle nonverbal communications necessary to implement those strategies effectively in real time is the primary manifestation of their NVLD-type profile. IRL, it can look like repeated, puzzling, patterns of social-emotional conflict or miscommunication. I don't know what led to your early departure from school, but this profile might be something to reflect on, and consider whether it explains any of your experience then or since.

I hope that your life path over the past two decades has taken positive and life-affirming directions.


...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...