Developmental Stages of Reading Processes in Children Who Are Blind and Sighted - January 2006

This article compares the development of print and braille reading in children who are blind and sighted in relation to Chall's stage model of reading development. Chall's model includes a prereading period, in which concepts are developed; middle stages, in which skills that are necessary for decoding text are developed; and later stages, which distinguish skilled readers on the basis of their highly developed schemata and cognitive skills that are necessary for effective comprehension and integration. The relevance of a developmental theory for directing training methods that facilitate braille literacy instruction is discussed. The process of reading may be said to begin when a sensory modality picks up encoded information from the world. Typically, reading is discussed in relation to the visual and cognitive processing that occurs with printed text. During visual reading, light from the printed page is reflected onto the retinas, where it is transferred to the brain for further processing. The brain applies higher cognitive functions that combine and transform arbitrary symbols into meaningful words and sentences that can represent most concrete and abstract thoughts. Thus, reading is an important cultural invention because it creates an effective medium for sharing information. When vision is not available to readers, information must be accessed using some other sensory modality. Readers of braille rely on their tactile sense to acquire information http://www.afb.org/jvib/jvib000106.asp (1 of 21)2/1/2006 11:25:56 AM Developmental Stages of Reading Processes in Children Who Are Blind and Sighted January 2006 from a body of text. Analogous to vision, information is picked up from the environment via the tactile sensory system and transferred to the brain, where it is processed into meaningful messages. Given the parallel means that readers who are blind and readers who are sighted use to change information from the outside world into representations within the mind, it seems appropriate to compare the two reading protocols. This article discusses the development of reading skills in print-reading individuals who are sighted and compares it to the developmental processes of individuals who are congenitally blind and learn to read using tactile formats. For children who are sighted, the formal process of learning to read usually begins during the earliest school years; however, before a child enters formal schooling, he or she can learn much about the world that facilitates the process of learning to read (Kupetz, 1993; Lawhon, 2000). The development of active verbal language skills, beginning with the first "real" spoken word at about 10-12 months, culminates in a fast mapping stage in which children are able to learn a large number of words with less exposure (Bjorklund, 2000). The earliest stages of speech acquisition are characterized by semantic overextensions and syntactic errors. Nevertheless, children quickly come to realize that objects, events, and psychological states can be represented with words (Klein, 1981). Bigelow (1990) found evidence of similar language-acquisition processes in children who are congenitally blind. In a study that examined the relationship between children's cognitive and language abilities, Bigelow demonstrated that total blindness does not impede the acquisition of early words in children who are blind, although it may delay the development of the concept of object permanence. (That is, the awareness that objects in the world continue to exist when one is not directly perceiving them.) Representations that children who are blind develop may differ, however, from those of http://www.afb.org/jvib/jvib000106.asp (2 of 21)2/1/2006 11:25:56 AM Developmental Stages of Reading Processes in Children Who Are Blind and Sighted January 2006 children who are sighted because of the different experiences that the two groups of children are likely to have had. As a simple example, consider the representation that a child who is sighted may have of an apple. An apple can be encoded as a red, semiround, sweet fruit. To a child who is blind, visual representations are not available, so the child must encode and store information about the apple using the representations that he or she has available from other sensory sources and memory. The child may have no conception of what it means to be "red" because he or she may never have experienced the visual sensation of "red." Perhaps, instead, the child encodes the apple as a small, smooth-textured, semispherical, sweet-tasting object. The point is that as children develop the vocabulary that they will use while learning to read, semantic representations may vary widely among them, depending on their experiences.