Speech Development in Children with Visual Impairments
This material is suitable for children of any school age.
Teachers working with visually impaired children should be prepared for potential speech development issues. These children lack visual information about their surroundings, making it difficult to perceive objects correctly in terms of shape and size. Consequently, their understanding relies heavily on tactile and auditory senses.
For example, a 5-year-old visually impaired girl, while walking with her mother, hears a sound resembling an airplane. She immediately identifies it as a large airplane based on the sound, despite not seeing it. This illustrates that visually impaired children form images through auditory cues, leading to fragmented perceptions. When these children start school, they usually have a substantial vocabulary and their coherent speech is based on an adequate understanding of spatial concepts.
When children with visual impairments start school, they often have a substantial vocabulary and their coherent speech is based on adequate spatial understanding.
The levels of speech development in visually impaired children can be:
- Extended Speech: Meaningful, grammatically correct, logical, complete, and connected statements.
- Full Speech: Adequate vocabulary but possible sentence construction errors.
- Incomplete Speech: Brief, fragmented speech with limited vocabulary.
- Babbling Speech: Systematic speech disorders.
To overcome any speech development issues, it is essential to start with non-verbal communication methods. These include smiles, eye contact, facial expressions, expressive hand and body movements, walking, pulling or pushing others, and postures that express various emotional states and attitudes toward the interlocutor.
For visually impaired children, it’s crucial to conduct exercises that develop facial expressions and gestures, as these communication methods primarily express the child’s emotional state and indicate their relationship with the surrounding world. Exercises should focus on developing the muscles of the face and neck. For example:
Exercise 1
Flare your nostrils, pretend to smell flowers. Recite the rhyme: “Let’s inhale through our nose, To smell the flower, here it goes.”
Exercise 2
Learn to blink rapidly with a calm face. Recite the rhyme: “A bunny hopped to us, Blinked quickly, without a fuss.”
Exercise 3
Practice looking surprised, raising eyebrows. Recite the rhyme: “I love to be surprised, From morning until night!”
Exercise 4
Practice frowning to express anger. Recite the rhyme: “Look at me, I’m mad today, No one wants to play.”
While doing these exercises, talk with the children frequently, engaging them in role-playing activities to use gestures, postures, and facial expressions.