The Use of Language in Simple Classification Tasks by Children who are Blind

Abstract

Two groups of classification tasks, verbal and figurative, were presented to 30 blind children and 30 sighted children aged 6–11. Although the younger blind children were significantly less efficient on both groups of tasks and on the vocabulary test, those who were age 11 had reached or were close to the level of the sighted children. The analysis illustrates how the blind children adjusted their conceptual knowledge to their lexicon, or vice versa (borrowing some linguistic patterns from the experimenter, if necessary).