Language and Experience: Evidence from the Blind Child [Repost]

We ask in this book how children learn which of the words in their language encode which of the meanings. We accept as self-evident that any explanation of this learning must take nonlinguistic experience as relevant: When children hear words spoken by adults, they also observe objects, scenes, and events. Yet the issues here are quite perplexing because, at least to first inspection, heard words seem to map only very inexactly onto the child's observations of objects, scenes, and events. After all, it must with .some frequency be the case that the child learner is attending to one thing (say, the ice cream on the sideboard) while the mother speaks of something else ("Eat your peas, dear!"). Woe to the learner who takes this particular word-toexperience pair as a basis for reconstructing the meanings conveyed by language. In light of such difficulties, we tried to get some insight into how the child constructs the right mappings between words and the world by examining a situation in which the opportunities to observe the world are diminished: the case of language learning by congenitally blind children. This approach is hardly new. Such philosophers as Locke and Leibniz considered the case of the congenitally blind to be crucial to their epistemological theories. From Locke's perspective, it was clear that the blind should be defective in their understanding of certain words, such as picture or blue, for he held that the concepts they encode can be derived only from specific sensory experience. In contrast, Liebniz held that much of this knowledge arises internally, and is not dependent on the information afforded by the individual senses-that in the end, lithe geometries of the blind man and the paralytic must come together and agree."