Language - Verbalism in the Narrative Language of Children Who Are Blind and Sighted - July 2005

This study examined the use of verbalisms by 62 children aged 7–14 who were totally blind from birth and 64 sighted children. It found that a child's degree of sight and gender did not affect the frequency with which verbalisms were used; only age had a significant positive effect. The study shows that language is a flexible structure that is used correctly by children who are congenitally blind as they adapt to the language used by those around them. The authors thank the schools for children who are blind that are run by the Organización Nacional de Ciegos in Madrid and in Alicante, as well as the Pizarrales and the Fonseca schools in Salamanca (Spain), for the invaluable aid they provided during the course of this research. In everyday language, there are words, such as beauty, that are difficult for the average person to define. People who are blind often use words that have a visual meaning (such as "I have seen," "Show me," or "The countryside is looking really green") that they may have difficulty defining, and it is interesting to observe the usage and meaning that such words of a visual nature can have for them. In this article, we present our study of this aspect of language behavior in children who were born blind, http://www.afb.org/jvib/jvib990704.asp (1 of 22)8/4/2005 8:01:52 AM Language Verbalism in the Narrative Language of Children Who Are Blind and Sighted July 2005 which is known as verbalism—the tendency to use words whose concrete referent is unknown to the speaker. In doing so, we reviewed the empirical research on this aspect of the language and behavior of people who are blind, but did not make use of the theoretical reviews that deal with this problem because these reviews were based mainly on research on verbalism (Dokecki, 1966; Dunlea, 1989; Landau, 1997; Landau & Gleitman, 1985; Mulford, 1988; Pérez-Pereira & Castro, 1997; Pérez-Pereira & Conti-Ramsden, 1999; Warren, 1994).