A comparison of sighted and visually impaired children’s text comprehension

• Published in: Research in developmental disabilities Vol. 85; pp. 8 - 19
• Main Authors: Papastergiou, Athanasia, Pappas, Vasileios
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Ltd 01.02.2019
• Subjects: Braille; Inference making ability; Listening comprehension; Reading comprehension; Visual impairment; Braille; Inference making ability; Visual impairment; Listening comprehension; Reading comprehension
• ISSN: 0891-4222; 1873-3379
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ridd.2018.10.003

•Visually impaired children show an advantage for literal questions.•Use of a non-parametric bootstrap augmented technique and regression techniques.•Visually impaired children show better overall performance under both modalities.•Implications for educational materials in Braille script. Do children with visual impairments outperform their sighted cohorts in reading and auditory comprehension tasks? We address this question by applying panel regression techniques on a comprehensive sample of 16 children with visual impairments from a Greek special school for students with visual impairments. By comparing the reader comprehender profile for both children types, we find that the children with visual impairments perform better than their sighted counterparts. The better performance is supported both unconditionally and conditionally on idiosyncratic characteristics, such as age, text complexity, modality, sex and reading ability. Decomposing the reader comprehender profile into a literal, global and local type of questions we find that the results are mainly driven by the superior performance of the children with VI in the literal questions.