Do Blind People Need Gestures to Communicate Effectively?

Abstract

Gestures are known to play an important role in communication, but to this day it is still not clear what impact visual impairment has on gesture production. The main objective of this article is to investigate: (1) whether the lack of vision reduces (or completely blocks) gesture production in blind individuals, and (2) whether this reduction in (or lack of) gestures has an effect on their abilities to communicate. To address this issue, we performed an experiment in which congenitally blind and sighted people were compared on the number and types of gestures they produced when playing the word-guessing game TABOO. The results obtained confirm that, compared to people who are sighted, blind individuals produce significantly fewer gestures when they communicate. This, however, does not have any negative impact on how effective they are in conveying their messages. The analyses also show that gestures play different roles for blind and sighted people.