Verbalism in Young Blind Children

This article discusses differences in language development between blind and sighted children and adolescents. The first part provides a review of the literature on the subject. The second part describes a study the author conducted at the Institute for the Blind in Milan, Italy. When 10 blind and 10 sighted 13- to 17-year-olds were asked to define 28 words representing objects, movements, animals, and facial expressions, the two groups performed equally well on the words for material objects. The blind group performed better than the sighted group on the other three categories of words.