Blind Chlidren and Language

Blind children and language.

Studying the language development for disabled children allow us, sighted people to develop an idea about how these children interact with language and how we can improve their life. Blind children acquire language in a different way than deaf or other disabled children. Each handicap learn language in their own way. Some linguists assume that blind people lack the main component of language acquisition; “vision” and that their lexical development and how they form syntaxes is quite different that other children. In this paper, we will study the development of morphology and syntax for blind children.

Linguists studied the 50 words that a blind child learn at first and compared it with the words that a sighted child might learn starting the same age. They found that the type of word the blind children learn first differed from that learned by sighted children; due to different acquisition of concepts regarding languages. (Perez-periera,1999 pp.72-74) Researches studied different categories of words that blind children learn. For example, some researchers divided the types of word to: specific nominal general nominal, action words, modifiers, personal social, and function words. Others used objects, people, family pets, sounds, actions and states etc. but it is important to note that these different categories used to not explain the differences found between the first word of a blind child and a sighted one. Also note that the age of language acquisition does not differ from that of sighted children. The results found by one of the researchers is that blind children present higher proportion in using specific nominal and action words but very low numbers were found for general nominal and no use of function words. It was also found that blind children are more in interested in furniture and household words, this is explained by the use of their own senses such as touch or hearing to identify these objects. Moreover, blind children...