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Deixis, personal reference, and the use of pronouns by blind children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 1999

MIGUEL PÉREZ-PEREIRA
Affiliation:
University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Abstract

Blind children are considered to use personal reference terms late and with a great deal of reversal errors. However, in previous research, there has been a dearth of both quantitative and qualitative data on their use of pronouns. In the present paper data from a longitudinal study of five children (three totally blind, one partially sighted, and one sighted) is presented. The children had different ages at the begining of the study, ranging from 0;9 to 2;5, and were followed for a time span of over 12 months. Every spatial deictic term and personal reference term used by the children was analysed. Special attention was given to the analysis of the reversal errors. The data obtained clearly showed that the blind children began to use personal reference terms as early as the sighted children, and that the use of reversals was not a general characteristic of the language of the blind children, since only one of the four blind or partially sighted children produced a noticeable percentage of reversals. The analysis of the contexts in which reversal errors were produced showed that imitation does not fully explain them, and some proposals for a multiplex explanation of reversals are offered. Thus, the data do not give support to the idea that blind children in general show problems with pronouns, nor to those claims that link blind children with autistic children in this regard.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

A former version of this paper was presented at the VIIth International Congress for the Study of Child Language. Istanbul, 14–19 July 1996. This research was possible thanks to the financial support of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Spanish government to the project PB95-0835. I wish to thank Gina Conti-Ramsden for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article and her patience in making my Spanish way of writing in English understandable.