M Gompel¹, W H J van Bon¹, R Schreuder², N Janssen¹, L T W Verhoeven¹, J J M Adriaansen3
¹University of Nijmegen, Special Education, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; ²University of Nijmegen, Psycho Linguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; 3Sensis, Education, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
From several studies it is known that visually impaired children are poorer readers than sighted children of the same age. A recent study (Gompel, van Bon, Schreuder, Adriaansen, Manuscript submitted for publication) showed that visually impaired children do not have problems with spelling. This seems to indicate that their orthographic knowledge is intact. In three experiments, the Reaction Times of fifth grade visually impaired children on words and on pictures was compared with those of sighted children. It was found that the between group variance on the word naming task is completely accounted for by the between group variance on the picture naming task. This result confirmed the hypothesis that the reading problems of visually impaired children do not have an orthographic basis, but are merely a matter of input restriction. In subsequent research we will investigate the influence of different factors on the visual input restriction. Factors of interest are: typographical features, word morphology and context. Data and results of this research will be available by the time of the Conference.
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