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Ramesh Kaipa - Masters student (Speech & Hearing), Dr.M.V Shetty College Of Speech & Hearing, Mangalore, India.
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Archana Jaolekar - Lecturer, Dr.M.V Shetty College Of Speech and Hearing, Mangalore, India.
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Praveen Kumar C.G. - Masters student (Speech & Hearing) , Dr.M.V Shetty College Of Speech & Hearing, Mangalore, India.
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Piyush Sone - Bachelors student (Speech & Hearing), Dr.M.V Shetty College Of Speech & Hearing, Mangalore, India.
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Pragmatic skills in blind children have not received enough attention from researchers. Hence this study aimed at assessing inadequacy in pragmatic skills among blind children. Seven congenitally total blind children, ranging from 6 - 10 years served as subjects. The assessment tool was adapted from “The Pragmatic protocol revised form” (Prutting & Kirchner, 1987) and “Profile of communicative appropriateness” (Penn, 1988). Data was collected through audio-video recording and samples were analyzed by three trained Speech Language Pathologists independently and then compiled. Teacher’s perspective was also taken into consideration for the same. The results indicate that most affected verbal aspects were topic (initiation, introduction, shift and completion), turn taking, stylistic variations, cohesion, feedback to speakers, etc along with non verbal aspects like physical proximity, head movements, facial expression, etc. On the other hand linguistic skills viz., greetings, reply, lexical selection and paralinguistic skills viz., quality of voice, intensity, pitch, intonation were least affected. Thus, blind children exhibit inadequate pragmatic skills of varying severity, hence alarming the need for intervention.
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