About the project
This research project aimed to investigate the contribution of visual processes to verbal communication; in particular, the act of referring to the physical world around us.
In order to investigate this question, the referential abilities of sighted and blind individuals was studied independently and comparatively. The project also investigated the referential abilities of a third and unique population, the Prakash children of Delhi: newly-sighted children who gained vision after they acquired language.
Since language acquisition takes place either with or without vision, studying the communicative development of newly-sighted children gave us an extraordinary opportunity: to isolate the contribution of visual processes to the development of referential communication. Our first research question was therefore unprecedented: how do the communicative abilities of blind children change once they gain vision?
Method
The project combined three research strands: blind, sighted and newly-sighted communication, and compared the referential abilities of school children with those of adults.
The main focus of the three research strands was the pragmatic process of 'audience design' in referential communication, or how speakers tailor their referential expressions to the needs of their interlocutors. To investigate this question, we used referential communication tasks in which pairs of participants interact with one another to arrange various objects in a display.
Objective
Our main interest in this type of task was to see how speakers refer to the different objects in the display, and whether their choice of referential expression reveals perspective taking (e.g., by avoiding ambiguity).
The speakers' eye-movements was recorded in order to investigate how visual processes affect the generation of referential expressions. We also adopted a longitudinal perspective, following the pragmatic development of the same group of Prakash children over a period of 3 years.
Duration
2018-2022.
Financing
This project was funded by a FRIPRO grant from the Research Council of Norway under the FRIHUMSAM program (275505).
Collaborating partners
- Professor Pawan Sinha, Director of Project Prakash and head of the Sinha Lab at MIT.
- Professor Julian Jara-Ettinger, head of the Computation and Cognitive Development Lab at Yale University.