Children who are blind or visually impaired can neither see words in print nor the objects that the words refer to, such as a tree or a car or a cloud.
So how does this impact their word learning and vocabulary development, all of which begins as auditory only?
Lindsay Harris wants to know – and the National Institutes of Health has awarded her a four-year, $745,000 grant to support that research and its potential positive implications for educational outcomes.
Funding comes from NIH’s National Eye Institute (Low Vision and Blindness Rehabilitation program).
Harris, associate professor of Educational Psychology, will start this fall on the project that aims to collect data from 100 children ages 5 to 12 from that special population and from 100 of their typically sighted peers.
“My background is as a researcher of reading in different writing systems so, as a grad student, I studied, ‘How does the brain develop differently if you’re growing up in China or growing up in Israel and learning to read a writing system that works differently than the alphabet we use?’ ” Harris says.
“And when I first came to NIU in 2014, that was what I expected to continue doing,” she adds.
“Then I realized that we had this really great Visual Disabilities program, and I was seeing people reading braille everywhere. I wondered what the research said on that, and I checked. Very few people from a cognitive sciences background have studied braille reading. That’s where this started.”
Nine years later, “I’ve realized that I need to start with language development more generally before I can learn about reading, specifically, because a lot of reading skill depends on language ability and basic semantic knowledge,” she says, “and something else I’ve learned is that we have very little understanding of what sort of semantic representations people who don’t have visual experiences have of the world.”
The nationwide research, which Harris and her team will conduct virtually, will ask participants questions about the words and definitions that they already know and then present them with words auditorily for them to define.
Different lists of age-appropriate words and corresponding multiple-choice answers are being chosen this fall for each comparison group.
Researchers also will ask participants who provide correct answers to explain how they learned the words and their definitions, whether from linguistic context or direct experience.
“Ultimately, we want to know if the number of words a typical 7-year-old kid who is blind can identify or define is more or less the same as typically sighted kids, and there are theoretical reasons to expect either of those possibilities.”
One line of reasoning, she says, is “that if you don’t have vision, then you’ve spent your whole life relying on and closely attending to linguistic information in order to make sense of the world, and so they may have an advantage in developing a vocabulary.”
The study is the first of its kind, says Harris, who teaches in the Department of Leadership, Educational Psychology and Foundations.
“In the past, all studies of age of vocabulary acquisition have presented visual options to kids – and, even for a sighted kid who has a reading disability, you’re not going to get an accurate picture of their vocabulary knowledge because you’re asking them to read, which is hard for them,” she says.
Researchers also hope to better understand the source of reading delays in children who are blind.
Poor vocabulary? Underdeveloped semantic representations? The difficulty of reading braille? Quality of literacy instruction? If preterm birth caused the blindness or visual disabilities, is it also responsible for the delays?
Or is a combination of these factors responsible?
“There is very little research into why that may be, and I can think of a lot of possible explanations, but not a lot of those possibilities have been actually tested,” Harris says.
“One possibility is that the children just don’t have the vocabulary or the word knowledge to comprehend what they’re reading,” she adds. “This research will help clarify that and, ultimately, we’d like to improve reading development in kids with visual impairments so if we recognize they have a vocabulary deficit, that can be targeted in interventions or classroom instruction to help bring them up to speed.”
Joining Harris in the study:
- Co-investigator Allison Gladfelter, associate professor in the NIU School of Allied Health and Communicative Disorders.
- Molly Pasley, assistant professor in the Visual Disabilities program of the NIU Department of Special and Early Education.
- Bradley Blair, NIU graduate research assistant and Orientation and Mobility specialist at Metrolina Association for the Blind.
- Rebecca Treiman, professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, who is serving as an external consultant.
All are eager to begin and to make differences for children who are blind or visually impaired, Harris says.
“It will be fun to learn how their brains and vocabularies develop,” she says. “This is going to lead to greater representation of people with disabilities in the literature on reading and language development. There are currently limited resources for this population, and the teachers, parents and other stakeholders who want to help them have very few places to turn.”
