Mother-Child Discourse and Visual Impairment

The study investigated mentalistic and descriptive discourse between school-aged children with visual impairment (VI) from birth, age 6-12 years, and their sighted mothers during joint book narrative (n=12), and in comparison to a group of sighted children of comparable age and verbal ability, and their mothers (n=14). The mothers of children with VI referred to the story characters' mental states and used descriptive elaborations to a greater extent than did the mothers of sighted children. The more mentalistic language the mothers of children with VI produced, the more mentalistic language was spoken by their children, although this was not independent of mothers' verbosity. The frequency of maternal elaborations, including their mentalistic language, was related the VI child's verbal cognition and socio-communicative competence. The findings offer an insight into nature and value of verbal scaffolding provided by mothers to their children with VI, shedding light on a potential candidate for future interventions.