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Pérez-Pereira M (2006), Language Development in Blind Children. In: Keith Brown,

(Editor-in-Chief) Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, Second Edition, volume 6,
pp. 357-361. Oxford: Elsevier.

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Language Development in Blind Children
M Pérez-Pereira, University of Santiago de
Au
Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The study of how blind children learn to talk is inter-
esting for two reasons. First, the more we understand
the process of language acquisition in blind children,
the better we can help them to progress in their devel-
opment. Second, the study of blind children can help
us understand the role of vision in language develop-
ment and, in turn, test theories of language acquisi-
tion. To examine the effect of vision on language
development, this article concentrates on children
born blind (congenital blindness); it excludes children
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 6, pp. 357–361
Language Development in Blind Children 357
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who lost vision later in development and therefore
had visual experience before suffering blindness, as
well as children who have residual functional vision
(visually impaired children).
Given the great individual differences that exist
among congenitally blind children, it is difficult to
depict a typical or characteristic portrait of these
children, and generalizations must be considered
with caution.
Blindness affects the development of congenitally
blind children in different ways, and language devel-
opment is one area minimally affected by the lack of
vision.
The use and knowledge of language in blind chil-
dren has been a controversial topic. The first studies
on this population, carried out in the 1950s, 1960s,
358 Language Development in Blind Children
and 1970s, were not very strict in terms of the method
used. Nevertheless, they were influential in the scien-
tific community and created among specialists the
belief that blind children showed difficulties, delays,
and malfunctions in their language development.
Only quite recently did a different view on the acqui-
sition of language by blind children appear in the
field. This was so in part because in more recent
studies, researchers applied modern techniques and
methods to study the acquisition of language.
Meaning
Cutsford was the first scholar to claim that the words
of blind children were meaningless, because the chil-
dren tended to define words (such as blood and
moon) using visual terms (such as red and yellow),
which are not accessible to them. To use Cutsford’s
expression, there exists a ‘‘verbal unreality of words.’’
However, there are problems with Cutsford’s investi-
gation. On one hand, conscious access to the meaning
al
of words (metalinguistic knowledge) may be different
from the real meaning that children have. On the
other hand, Cutsford’s conception of meaning is ex-
on
tremely limited. The meaning of a word does not
come solely from sensory experience and its concep-
tualization (reference). Language itself is extremely
rs
important in the creation of meaning (sense relations
and grammatical meaning). In addition, children
Pe
learn the meanings of words by reading adults’ inten-
tions (pragmatic meaning) in contexts of significant
social interactions in which the words are used re-
peatedly. Although studies did not support Cutsford’s
's
claim, the idea that blind children have problems
in developing a conventional meaning for words
or
persisted in the field.
Dunlea (1989) theorized that young blind children
had a limited capacity for generalizing a given word
th
for other items in the category and used a word (dog)
for the original referent (a dog puppet) or only few
Au
items in the category. A limited cognitive-based theo-
ry of meaning underlies this consideration. In
this view, concepts have a sensorial or referential
basis. Because blind children have limited access
to perceptual characteristics of the external world,
their concepts show a limited nonabstract character
and lack generalization. However, blind people
are able to form concepts that are equivalent to
those formed by sighted individuals. The point in
question is that blind children, and particularly
young blind children, may have difficulties in using
a given word for a variety of items simply because
they have restricted experience and cannot use, for
instance, the word dog for a dog that is walking
unless it barks, or a verb for an action performed
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 6, pp. 357–361
by another person unless the action has an audible
component. In any case, this limitation does not af-
fect the ability of blind children to form the concepts
underlying meanings, but only limits their access to
external information.
The learning of the meanings of words for which
blind children cannot have sensorial experience is
critical to understanding the complexities of the pro-
cess of meaning acquisition. Unexpectedly, blind
children around 4 years of age are able to compre-
hend that words such as green or red refer to concrete
characteristics of objects that they cannot perceive,
although other sighted people can, and they may ask,
‘‘What color is this?’’ In a similar vein, blind children
y
can distinguish between the meanings of see and look
op
without having had visual experience. Landau and
Gleitman (1985) showed how a blind girl (Kelly)
knew that for somebody to see a given object, the
C
object had to be in the viewer’s line of sight, and
there had to be no barrier between the person and
the object. However, Kelly used look with the mean-
ing of exploring objects with her hands.
What all these indicate is that blind children can use
the information provided by language itself in order
to learn the meanings of words. Color terms appear in
the same position as other qualifying adjectives, and
children can catch these positional regularities; that
is, they can draw meaning from grammatical infor-
mation as they acquire experience with language.
In summary, blind children use the same words as
their sighted peers and attribute similar meanings to
the words, although blind children probably rely on
the information provided by language to a greater
extent than sighted children.
Morphology
Most researchers have agreed that with the exception
of personal and possessive pronouns, the morpholog-
ical development of blind children is neither delayed
nor impaired, although it is different from that of
sighted children.
The results obtained by Dunlea and Andersen
(1992) suggest that at first young blind children use
few morphemes (plural, third person of present indic-
ative, and locative prepositions on and in) in formu-
laic structures and imitations. Productive use of these
morphemes appears later in blind children than in
sighted children. In line with their view of language
acquisition, these authors related this delay to the
cognitive difficulties blind children have in con-
ceptualizing the number of entities of the external
world, the spatial relationships of entities, and the
agency of others. However, first uses of morphemes
in formulaic and limited-scope structures (pivot

schemas, item-based constructions, for example) are
also typical of young sighted children; therefore, no
special explanation would be necessary to understand
blind children’s language. In contrast, it seems that
blind children use some morphemes, such as the reg-
ular past, earlier than sighted children, while other
morphemes are used at similar ages by both groups.
Blind children also use over-regularizations of irregu-
lar morphemes (goed, singed) at the same ages as their
sighted peers. This indicates that verbal morphemes
are the result of the use of a general rule, one that is
drawn thanks to the linguistic analysis of input
(Pérez-Pereira and Castro, 1997), contradicting the
idea that blind children show a lack of creativity in
their language.
Pronouns
According to the first studies on the topic (Fraiberg
and Adelson, 1973; Dunlea, 1989), the use of person-
al and possessive pronouns and adjectives by blind
al
children was deficient. In these studies, blind children
started to use pronouns productively very late (nearly
at age four), and they produced a great proportion of
on
reversal errors (first-person for second-person pro-
nouns and vice versa). These studies did not offer
quantitative data, making replication impossible,
rs
and relied on authors’ personal appreciation of data.
However, the view they offered fueled the idea that
Pe
blind children resemble autistic children, who typi-
cally produce numerous reversals. More recent re-
search (Pérez-Pereira, 1999) found that not all blind
children produced reversal errors and that most of
's
them produced few errors of this type, similarly to
what sighted children do. In addition, blind children’s
or
use of personal reference terms followed a develop-
mental pattern similar to that of sighted children:
they started to produce the first pronouns in formula-
th
ic expressions before 2 years of age, and between
2 and 3 years, all of them produced a great number
Au
and variety of pronouns in flexible structures. It was
also found that imitation of a previous utterance
produced by the interlocutor did not seem to be a
sufficient explanation of reversals, contrary to one
of the most widespread hypotheses. Children’s ability
to shift perspective and adopt a distinctive point of
view seems to be necessary for correct production of
personal reference terms. In any case, difficulties with
pronouns are not a general characteristic of blind
children as a group.
Syntax
As for syntactic development, compared with those of
sighted children, MLU (mean length of utterance)
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 6, pp. 357–361
Language Development in Blind Children 359
scores of blind children throughout development
indicate that blind children are not delayed.
When complexity of structures has been analyzed,
blind children have shown development similar to
that of sighted children not only during the first
steps of grammatical development but also during
the acquisition of complex sentences. Blind children’s
first use of coordinate and subordinate sentences
starts at 2;6 years of age or shortly thereafter, and at
3;6, blind children produce a great variety of complex
sentences, although they are not frequent. Around
4 years of age, blind children produce all types of
coordinate and subordinate sentences.
y
Pragmatics
op
Blind children use language with similar functions,
and learn to perform these functions, at the same
C
ages as sighted children. Nevertheless, some differ-
ences exist up until 4;6 years; these are connected to
the adaptive strategies that blind children put into
practice, and/or to their limited access to information
about external reality. However, these differences dis-
appear with time (Pérez-Pereira and Castro, 1997).
The main early difference is that blind children tend
to use self-oriented language, instead of externally
oriented language. Therefore, compared with sighted
children, they use descriptions of their own actions or
their own intentions to carry out an action, or expres-
sions of their wishes, to a greater extent than descrip-
tions of others’ actions. Blind children produce
language with reference to locations of objects and
actions, qualities of objects, and the description of
external events less frequently than their sighted
peers, which is surely due to blind children’s restricted
access to information of the external world. Blind
children also produce a lesser proportion of verbal
expressions to offer, show, or draw another’s atten-
tion (socially oriented speech) than sighted children,
probably because they lack the motivating factor of
perceiving their interlocutors.
Young blind children use a relatively high propor-
tion of calls or vocatives as a way of getting informa-
tion about the presence and location of other people
in the immediate environment as well.
Another differential characteristic of blind children
is their higher use of routines and repetitions/imitations
in comparison to sighted children. Learning and using
whole phrases or formulas for specific contexts and
activities allows blind children to participate in social
interactions and shared activities with other people
(Peters, 1994). This finding is related to the strategy
blind children follow in their learning of language.
Like children with autism, blind children have
been described as having serious difficulties in
360 Language Development in Blind Children
participating in communicative conversations
(Moore and McConachie, 1994, among others).
However, problems of method in many of these stud-
ies led the authors to reach wrong conclusions. When
analyses were performed on the basis of frequency of
initiations, and not proportion of initiations relative
to mothers’ initiations, it was found that blind chil-
dren initiated as many conversations as nonimpaired
children. In addition, they produced few conversa-
tional breakdowns and took as many turns as sighted
children did, indicating that blind children and
sighted children show similar abilities to participate
in communicative conversations (Pérez-Pereira and
Conti-Ramsdem, 1999, 2001, 2005).
Input
Andersen et al. (1993) said that apart from the con-
ceptual consequences of being visually deprived,
blind children generally receive less appropriate lin-
guistic input than sighted children and that the com-
al
bination of these two factors gives rise to their poor
linguistic development. Contrary to previous studies
(Moore and McConachie, 1994), the data we have
on
today have indicated that the mothers of blind
children use language well adapted to their needs
(Pérez-Pereira and Conti-Ramsden, 1999, 2001,
rs
2004). For instance, compared with the mothers of
sighted children, mothers of blind children are more
Pe
insistent in their intents to initiate and continue con-
versations with their children. In addition, the direc-
tives that mothers of blind children use include a
much greater number of descriptions of objects,
's
their locations, and the actions to be performed by
their children.
or
Strategies
th
Convergent characteristics of the language they pro-
duce suggest that blind children are inclined to use a
Au
particular strategy or style of language acquisition:
the rote-learned style or Gestalt style. Blind children
tend to imitate a great number of formulas and frozen
phrases first associated to certain scenes (Peters,
1987, 1994). These children tend to use frozen, or
unanalyzed, phrases first and analyze them later.
When blind children were compared with visually
impaired and sighted children at the beginning of
their combinatorial speech, it was found that blind
children used many more frozen phases and that pro-
ductive uses of a given combination appeared later in
development and were used less frequently between
21 and 25 months of age (Pérez-Pereira, 2001, 2004).
First combinations of words in blind children showed
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 6, pp. 357–361
a clear transition from rote-learned phrases to item-
based constructions and then toward a gradual
process of schematization and generalization.
Blind children relied on the use of modified and
expanded imitations and self-repetitions to a greater
extent than did sighted children, and all children used
these as a means to analyze language.
In general, the use of imitations and repetitions
allows children to produce utterances that are mor-
phologically more complex than their spontaneous
utterances (Pérez-Pereira, 1994), which indicates the
progressive role that imitations and repetitions play
in grammar development.
y
Conclusion
op
The adoption of an individual-differences approach
helps us to better understand the peculiarities of blind
C
children’s language acquisition. Former characteriza-
tions of blind children’s language as ‘parroting’ or
‘formulaic speech’ should give way to an understand-
ing of their language that takes into account the prev-
alence of a rote-learned or Gestalt style as a kind of
early strategy, rather than as a deficiency.
The fact that congenitally blind children eventually
manage to master language that does not differ from
that of sighted people is a critical test for theories of
language acquisition.
See also: Formulaic Speech; Language Development:
Overview; Variation in First Language Acquisition.
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A Lederberg, Georgia State University, Atlanta,
GA, USA
ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
's
Deaf children who have deaf parents typically ac-
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since the 1980s, deaf children’s ability to perceive
speech has improved through the use of cochlear
implants. These implants provide electrical stimula-
tion directly to the endings of the auditory nerve and
enable deaf children to perceive sound. While audi-
tory input is still less rich and finely detailed than that
received by hearing children, speech perception and
spoken language development is typically enhanced
by use of cochlear implants. A second common inter-
vention is to communicate with both speech and sign
simultaneously. The language in these simultaneous
communication (SC) programs is that of the hearing
culture (e.g., English, Italian, German) not that of
natural sign languages like American Sign Language
(ASL). For example, sign systems for English (collec-
tively called manually coded English, or MCE) typi-
cally consist of borrowed lexical signs from ASL and
invented signs that represent the functional aspects
of English (e.g., articles, auxiliaries, copula, tense
markers such as -ed, -ing) that are not expressed by
isolated signs in ASL. These signs are then produced
in English word order (Schick, 2003). Although SC
programs are designed to make language ‘visible’ and
thus fully accessible to deaf children, in reality, this
rarely happens. Hearing parents and teachers vary
greatly in their signing skills, and rarely sign all their