The recognition of emotional prosody in students with blindness: Effects of early visual experience and age development

Abstract

This study examined the role of early visual experience and age in the recognition of emotional prosody among students with visual impairments in China. A total of 75 primary and junior high school students participated in the study. The ability of participants to recognize the prosody of four basic emotions (sadness, anger, happiness, and neutrality) was explored. The findings were as follows. (1) Early visual experience had a significant effect on the recognition of emotional prosody. The accuracy rate of students with congenital blindness was lower than that of students with adventitious blindness, and the performance of students with congenital blindness was lower than that of sighted students. The students with congenital blindness exhibited the slowest recognition speeds. (2) Age had a significant effect on the emotional prosody recognition accuracy of the sighted students, but it had no effect on the students with blindness.

Vision plays a calibrating role in discriminating threat-related vocal emotions.

“…A further avenue to gather evidence on the effect of visual calibration could be the investigation of late onset blindness: late blind individuals have lost the sense of sight later in life, implying that vision was present at the critical period needed for calibration. A sensory calibration hypothesis would therefore not predict an impairment at a vocal discrimination task in late blind compared to EB subjects (cf., Chen et al, 2021).…”

“…When it comes to emotional signals, developmental studies have shown that blind children and adolescents are worse and slower than the sighted when discriminating prosodies of emotional sentences (Chen et al, 2021) and have difficulties at recognizing vocal expressions of emotions (Blau, 1964; Dyck et al, 2004; Minter et al, 1991). Furthermore, blind children face challenges in emotion regulation (Chennaz et al, 2022) and have difficulties expressing emotions and reading other people’s mind (Roch-Levecq, 2006).…”

Vision plays a calibrating role in discriminating threat-related vocal emotions

“…A sensory calibration hypothesis would therefore not predict an impairment at a vocal discrimination task in late blind compared to early blind subjects (cf. Chen et al, 2021).…”

Differentiating Instruction for Students Who Are Blind and With Low Vision

“…Not only are the prevalence rates of students who are blind or have low vision increasing (Varma et al, 2017), these students and their families are increasingly aware of the opportunities for educational success and are more readily available when their teachers provide needed differentiated instruction. Providing educational supports for students who are blind or have low vision is essential to their development because severe vision impairment is associated with long-term delays in motor development, language, social-emotional development, and overall cognitive functioning (Adelson & Fraiberg, 1974;Chen et al, 2022;Wakefield et al, 2006). Without appropriate resources and supports, school-age children who are blind or have low vision are likely to experience lower levels of educational success (Flaxman et al, 2017).…”