The Study of Connected Speech in Visually Impaired and Mentally Retarded Primary School Children (in Comparison with Other Categories of Children) while Preparing the Descriptive Stories

The article describes one of the aspects of the connected speech studies in visually impaired and mentally retarded primary school children in comparison with peers with impaired and normal development. The connected speech was examined while composing the descriptive stories about a natural and illustrated object and while composing a story based on a narrative picture and on own life events. The whole study included four series of experiments and we present two of them in this article. The following components of the speech were analyzed: the range of statements, lexical structure, types of sentences, composition and logical structure of the text. These components were analyzed while a child was preparing a descriptive story when presented both a natural object – a tomato, and a picture – a cow. The results show peculiarities of the connected speech formation and development in mentally retarded children with visual impairment. The independent preparation of a descriptive story allows detecting specific deviations in speech of different groups of abnormal children and confirms the necessity to search for differentiated ways of their correction.

Keywords: mentally retarded, visually impaired, visually impaired and mentally retarded children, complex defect, intellectual activity, connected speech, lexical composition, visual perception.

Column: Educational Psychology