EARLY EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE OF SEVERELY VISUALLY-IMPAIRED CHILDREN

This paper presents a comparison of the early language of nine blind a nd nine severely visually impaired children, with no other impairments , who were recruited from paediatric vision clinics in London and asse ssed in the second and third year of life using the Reynell-Zinkin Dev elopmental Scales. Further information on milestones and content of ea rly expressive language was obtained from parents' diary recordings of their children's emerging words. It is concluded that severely visual ly impaired children's expressive language tends to develop later than that of sighted children. The effect of children having even a small amount of vision could be discerned in their early words. The developm ental course appears to be particularly variable for blind children, w ith implications for parental counselling.