Language Development and Social Interaction in Blind Children

Miguel Perez Pereira, Gina Conti-Ramsden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000031119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

The Classic Edition of this foundational text includes a new preface from Miguel Pérez-Pereira, examining how the field has developed since first publication. The volume provides an in-depth account of blind children's developing communicative abilities, with particular emphasis on social cognition and language acquisition from infancy to early school age. It provides insights into why the development of blind children may differ from that of sighted children and explores development of "theory of mind" and perspective taking in language learning. It also discusses the caregiver–child interaction, research on early intervention and practical strategies for blind children that can assist parents and practitioners. The up-to-date preface discusses recent neurological research and the comparison between the psychological development of visually impaired and autistic children.

Language Development and Social Interaction in Blind Children continues to facilitate dialogue between those interested in the study of typically developing children and those interested in the development of children who are blind, and challenges some widely held beliefs about the development of communication in blind children.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: The study of blind children’s development

BLIND CHILDREN AND DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

The study of children with visual disabilities is an interesting realm of research for two reasons. On the one hand, there are practical reasons. Knowledge about how blind children develop can help us design new techniques of intervention and offer blind children better services to improve their quality of life. In this connection, the study of blind children is particularly important in providing information for the development of educational programmes for blind children and for the implementation of intervention programmes. In addition, intervention programmes may be able to help us better understand how educational and environmental changes affect blind children’s development. It is important that we allow intervention studies to have a more central role in theoretical discussions about the importance of environment in development. At present such studies have been valued mostly for their immediate practical interest without regard to the possible contribution that well-designed and well-controlled intervention studies can provide to theory.

On the other hand, the study of blind children’s development constitutes a unique opportunity to study the effect of vision on development. Thus, congenitally blind children without added handicaps allow us to study how lack of vision affects human development. In this regard, congenitally blind children provide us with what can be called a natural experiment. For this reason, the study of blind children’s development will help us to get a better understanding of more general issues surrounding developmental processes. Lewis and Collis (1997b) have suggested a number of areas which can be illuminated by the findings of the studies of children with disabilities. These may help scholars to elucidate whether certain achievements are a prerequisite for later achievements, as well as interdependencies between developmental processes. For example, the issue of the cognitive underpinnings of a first language may be tested with data from research with blind children, who, in general, show a delay in their early cognitive development (see Chapter 2). As Lewis and Collis (1997b) point out, the fact that two different behaviours emerge at the same time in normally developing children does not imply that there exists a relationship of dependency between them. The results of the studies of children with disabilities may help us to view things from a different perspective. These results may also be useful to readjust the importance given to certain aspects of psychological functioning. Traditionally, normal children have been seen as a benchmark of achievement and as exemplars of what areas may be of interest in development. This approach disregards or overlooks important phenomena which may arise more clearly in children with disabilities. Concerning vision in particular, Developmental Psychology has traditionally given visual information an important role in development to the detriment of other aspects of development, such as language and the information it provides to human beings. The study of blind children’s development may contribute to these issues being reconsidered. We need to have bi-directional influences in our understanding of development from research with normal, sighted children and from research with children with disability/impairments such as blindness.

From a theoretical point of view, the study of blind children’s development has been approached from different perspectives. Roughly, two approaches to the study of blind children may be discerned. The first perspective, which was predominant in the field for many years, views blind children’s development in terms of the normal developmental milestones achieved by other non-impaired children. Discrepancies between blind children and sighted children are attributed to visual impairment. As Webster and Roe (1998) have indicated, this approach assumes a “visual impairment as deficit” model and tends to locate the causes of delay inside the child. Furthermore, this deficit stance adopts a homogeneous view of development, according to which all the children follow a similar pattern of development. Individual differences are not seriously taken into account, and there is no room for considering different routes or patterns of development.

In contrast, the second perspective contemplates the possibility that children may show different routes and styles of development. Blind children may use different strategies and learning styles through which they can compensate for the absence of visual information by paying more attention to other sources of information. This may result in blind children following different routes in development. The consideration of differences in developmental patterns is even more pertinent if we take into consideration that the population of blind people is highly heterogeneous. Blind children vary in their aetiologies or causes of blindness, which produces important individual differences, they also vary in their degree of vision, even within the category of legal blindness, in the existence or not of additional handicaps, in the time when visual loss took place, and so on. Moreover, environmental variables, such as parental styles of rearing, educational practices, available social services, etc., may vary greatly around the world, and the development of blind children can be affected by these circumstances. All these reasons should make researchers who are interested in blind children less reluctant to adopt an individual differences approach (Warren, 1994). In Chapter 4 we will return to this issue.

THE CHILDREN IN QUESTION

It is difficult to know with certainty how many people are blind because registers are not always reliable (Webster & Roe, 1998). It is even more difficult to know the incidence of blindness in childhood, and specially congenital blindness. Figures vary depending on the institution which offers the data. Discrepancies between the criteria used to define blindness in different countries adds complexity to the task. In general, the prevalence of visual impairment under the age of 16 as estimated by the Royal National Institute for the Blind in Great Britain reaches 1 in 1000 children (Walker, Tobin, & McKennell, 1992). In Spain, the estimate of visual impairment prevalence reaches 1.63 per 1000. According to the data of the ONCE (Organización Nacional de Ciegos de España, “Spanish National Organisation for the Blind”), 44% of the population of blind people were born blind, and 24% of the total population of blind people lost vision from 1 to 15 years of age (Alvira, 1988; Rosa, 1993). Therefore, 68% of the total population of blind people were blind under 16 years of age, which makes a prevalence of blindness under 16 years of age of 1.1 in 1000. This figure is very similar to the estimates for Great Britain. Estimates of the population of children born blind in Spain are predicted to reach 0.7 in 1000. Guralnick and Bennett (1987) discuss a prevalence of 0.4 per 1000 of developmental disability due to visual impairment in the early years in the USA.

As already pointed out, there are differences among countries in how legal blindness or visual impairment are defined. For example, a person is considered blind if he or she has a visual acuity after correction which is equal or less than 3/60 in UK, 20/200 in EEUU, or 1/20 (80% of visual loss) in Spain. Partial sight is defined as visual acuity between 3/60 and 6/60 in UK, and 20/200 and 20/80 in USA. None the less, many legally blind children may have some degree of vision, and individual differences exist among children who are considered blind. Children may become blind as a consequence of different aetiologies, which may bring about differences in their degree of vision, and the existence or not of additional disabilities (see Webster & Roe, 1998 for a clear summary). Even though two children have identical visual acuity, they may show important differences, depending on their styles of learning, developments of other areas, everyday experiences, etc. This means that researchers must look at individual differences and diversity all along. Individual differences have been observed among typically developing children also. Notwithstanding, the individual differences that sighted children show are magnified in the blind population.

Our hypothesis is that the environment may play a more critical role in the development of blind children than in other handicaps or in non-impaired children. Or to put it in other words, blind children may be able to exploit a conducive, supportive environment in order for them to learn. This is in sharp contrast to what is evident in children with autism in that such children lack the ability to “make use” of the information and support provided by the environment (Davidson & Harrison, 1997; Dawson & Osterling, 1997). This contrast between children with autism and blind children illustrates the different effects that the environment has depending on the nature of children’s disabilities. For example, blind children are able to make use of routines used by their parents to promote their cognitive, social, and linguistic development (Pérez-Pereira & Castro, 1997; Peters, 1994). Nevertheless, children with autism are not able to go beyond replicating “pure” routines. In a similar vein, it is known that intervention programmes seem to have a more effective result with blind children than with children with autism. It is our assumption that the effect of intervention programmes will differ depending on the characteristics of the children. Intervention programmes may be able to help us understand how education/environmental changes affect blind children’s development, and to compare the effects of these programmes in blind children and other children such as children with autism. As for the effect of environmental circumstances in blind and sighted children, the developmental distance between blind children who live in impoverished circumstances and those who live in stimulating familial environments is probably higher than that existing between sighted children in those environments, suggesting that blind children may be more prone to the effects of the environment than sighted children are.

METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

In spite of its potential value, the research with blind children has suffered from a lack of methodological rigour. This may be the case for a number of reasons. Most studies have been carried out from a comparative, cross-sectional perspective. In this type of studies, mean comparisons predominate, which hide individual differences. These studies also adhere to a normative view which has been often linked to cross-sectional methodology in general. Cross-sectional studies provide general information, in other words a group view. Moreover, cross-sectional studies can not inform us about possible patterns of change, nor about differences in patterns of change. Developmental processes are derived from data from subjects who may vary greatly. Such an approach also assumes that subgroups of different ages follow the same developmental pattern, and that the results obtained by older subjects in a particular study would be the same to those obtained by the youngest subgroup if such subgroup were to be examined a few years later. That is to say, this position suggests that all children develop in the same way, following the same route. However, if we take into consideration the great variability observed in particular behaviours in blind children, which is in accordance with the wide variation of the population of blind children, it is difficult to make general statements from the data obtained in cross-sectional studies. It is particularly difficult to ascertain whether a particular behaviour in blind children is typical of blind children’s behaviours or atypical of blind children’s behaviours. We can not apply the same notions of normal distributions to populations of blind children. We simply do not have enough information to be able to make informed judgements. The comparative approach has resulted in many small scale, cross-sectional, comparative studies. As a consequence, there has been a dearth of in-depth, longitudinal studies of blind children.

Longitudinal studies have advantages over cross-sectional studies in a number of fronts. They allow us to observe changes across time, to document the course of development, to evaluate the impact of blindness at different stages of development, and so on. Other advantages include being able to obtain an actual picture of the development of blindness and different routes that children may follow, and thus, open up the opportunity for the researcher to appreciate individual differences in development. In addition, such studies allow us to observe how children’s difficulties change across time. Longitudinal methods do not hide individual differences but highlight them by providing opportunities for the researcher to observe patterns of development.

However, longitudinal studies are labour intensive and expensive; inevitably, the few longitudinal studies carried out with blind children have usually been small in scale. In addition, the population of blind children is small, and it is difficult to find blind children with the appropriate characteristics. This state of affairs has created difficulties in being able to make general statements about blind children’s development. It is problematic to generalize to the whole population of blind children from the study of five subjects, especially given the high variation which is known to exist in this population. This may account for some of the discrepant findings of different longitudinal studies perhaps due to the heterogeneity of the subjects used in the investigations.

In the same vein, there has been a lack of rigour in the methodological approach to the study of children with disability, especially blind children. The fact that little status has been given to the importance of disability in our understanding of development has worked as a disadvantage to the field as the same rigorous principles of study have not been applied to the “applied” area of the study of disability and blindness in particular. In addition to these, there are other methodological pitfalls that affect cross-sectional studies as much as longitudinal studies. These pitfalls diminish the value of a number of studies. The first deals with the use of instruments used (tasks, tests, techniques) in research investigating blind children’s development. It is not unusual to read studies on blind children’s development where the authors used tests and techniques that were designed for non-impaired children, but that are not well suited for blind children (Tobin, 1994). We will offer two examples. The first one is the study of Brown, Hobson, Lee, and Stevenson (1997) where the authors applied the WIPPSI or the WISC, two intelligence tests for sighted children, to blind and sighted children in order to assign the children into two groups with different IQs. It is clear that the scores obtained by the blind subjects are not comparable to those gained by the sighted children, since both tests require the processing and handling of visual material. The use of such material therefore introduces a bias into the design of the study that makes comparisons across subject groups difficult. Furthermore, these authors made partial use of these tests (such as the verbal subtests of the WISC) only, complicating further the measure of IQ they obtained in the study (see also Dekker, Drenth, & Zaal, 1991; Groenveld & Jan, 1992).

The second example is Dunlea’s sorting tasks to study the generalization of concepts (Dunlea, 1989). The tasks developed in this study were not well adapted to blind children’s characteristics, and, consequently, may again introduce bias which may result in the task underestimating blind children’s capacities (see also Chapter 4). In cases like these, the tests and techniques used do not allow for blind children to demonstrate a given skill. This points to the need to develop new methodologies, tasks, and techniques that allow blind children an equal chance to demonstrate a given ability (Lewis & Collis, 1997b).

A second methodological issue in research with blind children deals with the comparability of the behaviours observed in blind and sighted children. In some occasions, there is a problem of narrowness of interpretation by assuming that a behaviour has a similar function by the mere fact that it is outwardly identical to behaviours observed in normal sighted children. Two apparently identical behaviours may serve different functions and can be the result of different underlying processes, and vice versa, two different behaviours may fulfil a similar function. The problem of the meaning and the function of a given behaviour has arisen not only in doing comparisons between blind and sighted children, but also in doing comparisons between blind children and other disabled children, namely children with autism. In the case of the comparisons between sighted and blind children, the absence of a given behaviour in blind children has been considered as an indication of the non-existence of the function that this behaviour fulfils in sighted children, without considering that alternative behaviours may exist in blind children that perform the desired function. For example, it has been considered that the absence of typical early communicative behaviours, such as pointing or offering, indicates that blind children are unable to communicate until they begin to use language. However, a number of researchers (Preisler, 1991; Urwin, 1984a) have shown that blind children may use alternative behaviours to communicate with their mothers. The identification of these behaviours, which use not the visual channel, but touch, movement, and sound, calls for sensitivity on the part of the researchers to be able to appreciate the meaning of such non-conventional behaviours. Now taking it the other way round, we also need to realize that similar behaviours may have different meanings for blind and sighted children. In this connection, Burlingham (1964) was the first who pointed to the different meaning that quieting behaviours have for sighted and blind children. For the latter this behaviour is exhibited not because blind children are uninterested in social stimuli, but because in being quiet blind children can appreciate such stimuli better, they can attend. All this means that, sometimes, the behaviour subjected to scrutiny and investigation may be inappropriate in that it falsely highlights what cannot be done by blind children. This state of affairs is not only inaccurate but makes it quite difficult to recognize alternative routes for development.

In the case of the comparisons between blind children and children with autism, we are suspicious of comparisons of blind children with autism and of descriptions of blind children as autistic-like. It is our opinion that the term “autistic-like” is vacuous and does not provide an explanation of why the behaviour may be occurring and for what purposes. Such use of terminology as explanation glosses over the complexity of the context within which behaviours occur and it wrongly assumes that superficial similarities translate into functional and developmental similarities. It needs to be made clear that we are not against comparisons. But, such comparisons across populations need to be carefully designed and examined so that they are informative to the conditions in question. In addition, explanations need to include how and why similarities are found across different disability groups and whether or not they serve similar functions. For example, the use of stereotypic speech seems to have different functions in blind children than in children with autism (see Chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion). Thus, to call blind children “autistic-like” does little for our understanding of the use of stereotypic speech in this population.

There are other methodological pitfalls in a number of studies involving blind children. The conditions under which the subjects are tested is important if we want to make sure that sighted and blind children have similar opportunities to demonstrate their abilities. Nevertheless, in studies which compare blind children to a control group of sighted children in certain tasks, the amount and type of information used to succeed i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• About the authors
• Preface to the classic edition
• 1. Introduction: The study of blind children’s development
• 2. Motor and cognitive development
• 3. Social interaction, the beginnings of communication, and the development of a theory of mind
• 4. Language development in blind children (1)
• 5. Language development in blind children (2)
• 6. Parent-child conversational interaction with blind children
• 7. Ideas on intervention with blind children
• Notes
• References
• Author index
• Subject index