ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on language development in blind children and discusses the acquisition of personal reference terms, pragmatic development, verbal routines, and imitative speech, as well as a more general discussion of blind children’s language and language development theories. The acquisition of personal reference terms, and pronouns in particular, has been considered as one of the most distinctive features of blind children’s language. This chapter reviews how blind children use language in order to make statements, to ask questions, to request, and so on, that is to say, how children convey the illocutionary force of speech. The possibility of comparing the results of other blind children to those of the twin girl are specially interesting, since the authors have already compared this blind girl to her sighted twin sister. As A. E. Mills has stated, research on the language of blind children has seldom focused on theoretical questions about language acquisition, with a few exceptions.
