Communication between blind and severely visually impaired children and their parents

This study examines communications directed to young visually impaired children by their parents. Eight totally blind children and eight children whose vision was severely impaired were visited at home at around 18 months of age and video-recordings were made of each child interacting with a familiar caretaker. It was found that the parents of blind children were more likely to initiate interactions themselves and tended to use verbal comments unaccompanied by actions more frequently. They were less likely to talk about objects which were at the child's current focus of attention and were more likely to describe the properties of objects to the child using general terms such as pronouns or general nouns. In addition, they tended to request verbal information from their children in contrast to the parents of severely visually impaired children, who were more likely to describe objects for them. Children in both groups received more requests for action than any other utterance type and all parents made infrequent mention of the attributes of objects. The differences between the groups are discussed in terms of the difficulties faced particularly by parents of blind children in initiating and sustaining interactions.