ABSTRACT
All children learning to talk acquire their conversational skills within the context of dialogue and, most commonly, within the context of caregiver-child dialogues. Conversational interactions with blind children have been characterized as being highly asymmetrical, with blind children rarely initiating dialogue or doing so to a lesser extent than sighted children. Differences between child-directed speech and adult-adult speech are so well known and well documented in the literature that the terms “motherese”, and more recently, “parentese”, have been coined to refer to them as a cluster of co-occurring behaviours. The chapter examines in detail the information available on parent-child interaction with blind children. It seeks to emphasize that research with blind children is in need of reconceptualization. Parent-child interaction with blind children is a process that inherently involves different goals and most likely uses different routes to achieve them. One of the most consistent themes in the literature on parent-child interaction with atypical language learners has been parents’ directive style.
