Body Movement and Verbal Encoding in the Congenitally Blind

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The purpose of the study was to examine the prevalence of object- and body-focused hand movements of the congenitally blind individuals engaged in an encoding task and to determine the relation of these movements to verbal performance. Ten Ss participated in a 5-min. videotaped monologue. The video portion was coded for hand movements using Freedman's categories of analysis. The audio portion was scored for grammatical complexity according to a system developed by Steingart and Freedman. It was found that: (1) Blind Ss engaged only in body-focused movements; object-focused movements were almost completely absent. (2) Blind Ss displayed significantly greater amounts of body-focused (primarily finger-to-hand) movements than a group of sighted Ss observed in a previous study. (3) There was a correlation of .51 between finger-to-hand movements and verbal fluency and a correlation of –.53 between body-touching and verbal fluency. (4) Ss with a prevalence of finger-to-hand movements showed significantly greater language skill at encoding complex sentences which portray descriptions of patterned, interrelationships among experiences, while Ss with a predominance of continuous body touching gave a less skillful language product in this regard. The findings indicate the central role of motor activity in ongoing thought construction. They also indicate that for the blind, finger-to-hand motions contribute to the evocation of sensory experiences as a necessary pre-condition for linguistic representation.