Semantic fluency in primary school-age children with vision impairment

Area of Science:

• Speech and Language Pathology
• Developmental Psychology
• Ophthalmology

Background:

• Semantic fluency tasks are a potential tool for assessing vocabulary in children with vision impairment due to their lack of visual stimuli.
• Previous research has not established whether children with vision impairment perform differently on semantic fluency tasks compared to their sighted peers during primary school years.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the semantic fluency performance of children with and without vision impairment.
• To investigate the impact of vision impairment severity on semantic fluency task outcomes.
• To determine if semantic fluency is a suitable assessment tool for children with vision impairment.

Main Methods:

• A comparison was made between British English speaking children aged 5-11 with vision impairment (n=45) and sighted children (n=30).
• Participants completed a semantic fluency task within the 'animals' category, with a one-minute response time.
• Performance was evaluated based on accuracy, error types, semantic clusters, and switching patterns.

Main Results:

• Performance on semantic fluency tasks, specifically the 'animals' category, did not significantly differ between children with and without vision impairment.
• Increasing age correlated with improved performance in both groups.
• The severity of vision impairment did not influence task performance.

Conclusions:

• Semantic fluency performance is comparable between children with and without vision impairment.
• Semantic fluency tasks are a potentially valuable and accessible tool for speech-language pathologists to assess language abilities in children with vision impairment.
• The findings support the use of non-visual language assessment tools for children with visual impairments.