Submitted by nczechowska on 30 March, 2010 - 18:16.
The Department of English Language Acquisition and the PSYCHOLinguistics Reading Group
invite you to a guest lecture by:
Katarzyna Jaworska-Biskup (PhD)
The effect of congenital blindness on concept development and understanding
"If we understand concepts differently from sighted children, does it mean that we understand concepts incorrectly?”(a question asked by an 8 years old blind boy).
Most of the estimates assess that approximately 80 or 90 per cent of all information is vision based. This observation entirely suggests how difficult for those devoid of sight is to attain major conceptualizing skills. The question thus arises whether it is possible to construct a correct representation of the world when one of the senses is impaired. It is also debatable whether congenitally blind children display erroneous or highly individual understanding of concepts, particularly visual concepts such as colors, nature elements, textures etc.The purpose of the following presentation is to discuss briefly the author’s findings regarding concept understanding by young blind language users. The principle of sight primacy in cognition will be addressed and confronted with research data obtained from a study in the group of sighted and congenitally blind subjects of 7-10 years of age. The results show many differences in the understanding of concepts between sighted and blind subjects with egocentric-based responses, gaps in the knowledge or incorrect understanding of concepts, a high number of metaphors, stereotypic speech and analogical comparisons on the part of blind children. The differences however diminish with age and result from a limited exposition to concepts. The outcomes of the study prove that the understanding of concepts is strictly related to experience rather than a dominant sense modality. Hence the hypothesis of sight prominence seems to be unfounded, and sight should be given only a facilitative rather than principal role in conceptual development. Blind children need more time to create representations of concepts, and being constrained by their inability to see develop certain compensatory cognitive strategies which help them to communicate with sighted speakers.
Wednesday, 14 April 2010, 6:30 p.m., room 601A
