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A blind child's meaning for look : a replication of Landau & Gleitman

University of British Columbia

Landau and Gleitman's experiments investigating a blind child's meaning for look, as it applied to herself, were replicated with a three year old boy who was totally blind, and had no concomitant disorders. Several commands to look were presented within informal play sessions. Responses to the look commands were compared with responses to instructions to touch, listen and taste. Experiments were video recorded for subsequent analysis. It was found that the blind child associated the haptic perceptual modality with the visual verb, in that an instruction to look at an object elicited manual exploration of the object. His meaning for look was distinct from his meanings for the other perceptual verbs. These findings were consistent with Landau and Gleitman's findings. Landau and Gleitman's interpretation, of how a blind child's mastery of visual terms bears on the word/meaning mapping problem, is critically discussed.

Text

2010-07-16

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26501

Audiology and Speech Sciences

University of British Columbia

Graduate