Early expressive language of severely visually impaired children

This paper presents a comparison of the early language of nine blind and nine severely visually impaired children, with no other impairments, who were recruited from paediatric vision clinics in London and assessed in the second and third year of life using the Reynell-Zinkin Developmental Scales. Further information on milestones and content of early expressive language was obtained from parents' diary recordings of their children's emerging words. It is concluded that severely visually 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 developmental course appears to be particularly variable for blind children, with implications for parental counselling.