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

Abstract

Aim: Do children with visual impairments outperform their sighted cohorts in reading and auditory comprehension tasks?

Methods: 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.

Results: 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.

Conclusion: 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.

Keywords: Braille; Inference making ability; Listening comprehension; Reading comprehension; Visual impairment.