Research on the levels of speech development in children with visual impairments

The article discusses the results of a study of speech skills in children with combined disorders. A child learns the speech he hears around him, selecting and adapting it to solve communicative tasks that arise in accordance with his life needs at a certain stage of development. It is the development of communicative activity that determines the formation of speech, and not vice versa. The speech of children of the same age, but with different levels of development of communicative skills, differs significantly. In contrast, the speech of children of different ages, who are at the same level of communicative activity, has similar characteristics - lexical composition, grammatical complexity and sentence construction. This is explained by the fact that typical tasks for each level of communication form a selective perception and assimilation of the speech features that children hear. Therefore, for the development of speech, it is important not only to offer a variety of speech material, but also to set new communication tasks that stimulate the use of new speech tools. The study found that children with combined disorders have underdevelopment of the content side of speech, sound pronunciation, lexical-grammatical structure and vocabulary. These disorders are due to significant vision problems caused by dysfunction of the visual analyzer, as well as early speech underdevelopment. Most children in the experimental group had a low level of cognitive activity: children rarely asked questions, their speech was slowed down, and speech initiative was almost absent. Answers to questions were delayed, simplified and often inaccurate. Vocabulary, especially verbs, was limited. Children did not show interest in speech contacts during walks and games. In general, preschoolers with combined disorders were not sufficiently oriented in communicative situations associated with various types of activities.