| Summary: | The main goal of this study was to determine how blind children conceptually represent
the temporal and spatial relationships in the story, Frog, Where Are You? This was
accomplished by examining the terms blind children used to express the temporal and
spatial relations in narrating the complex scenes and events in the story. A secondary
objective was to determine the global coherence of the children's narratives by
analysing their use of tense in their narratives - specifically whether they chose to use
an anchor tense — as well as their inclusion of the main plot components of the story.
Final goals were to determine the extent to which the blind children used memorized
clauses while retelling the story and how the results obtained from blind children
compared with those from age-matched sighted children.
The study involved audio taping five blind children and five age-matched sighted
children's retelling of Frog, Where Are You? after they heard different versions of the
story over the period of a week. The narratives were transcribed and analysed for
temporal and spatial categories, anchor tense and plot units, and whether they
contained clauses identical or close to the clauses in the written versions of the story.
Results indicate that children in both groups grounded their narratives in an
anchor tense and assigned a signalling function to rarer verb forms. Both groups used
a large number of time expressions. The sighted children narrated more events as
being simultaneous than did the blind children; however, there were no group
differences on the comprehension questions. All the children also used a fair number
of spatial markers, but these were rarely if ever used to relate the position of the two
protagonists. Sighted children, rather than blind children, tended to overestimate
distances. Sighted children included more plot components in their narratives than did
blind children. Finally, the use of verbatim repetition of clauses was found to be higher
in blind children's narratives. In summary, results show some differences, especially
with regard to spatial concepts, in the narratives of blind and sighted children.
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