A Comparison of the Word Recognition Processes of Blind and Sighted Children

Abstract

2 word/nonword decision experiments were carried out to investigate differences in reading that might exist between congenitally blind children reading Braille and sighted children dealing with print. 3 aspects of single-word recognition were studied: semantic processing, word-frequency effects, and phonological recoding. In addition, a comparison of word recognition performance was made under normal conditions and under conditions of reduced legibility. The sighted children showed an increased semantic facilitation effect with degraded when compared with undegraded print conditions. In contrast, for the blind children this trend was reversed. The magnitude of the word-frequency effect was unaffected by script legibility in either group. In addition, an increased difficulty of rejecting pseudohomophones (e.g., bloo) relative to legal nonwords (e.g., ploo) was found for the blind in the degraded condition and for the sighted with degraded and undegraded print. These results are discussed in terms of the relative influence of perceptual feature-analysis processes and attentional semantic processing.