Investigation of Performance in Selected Auditory Tasks by Blind and Visually Impaired Children and Teenagers

The present work discusses results concerning sound perception obtained in selected auditory tasks, such as pitch discrimination and pitch-timbre categorization for blind and visually impaired subjects (children and teenagers). Listeners were divided into two age groups: 7-13 year olds and 14-18 year olds. The study tested 20 individuals (8 congenitally blind and 12 visually impaired) and 20 sighted persons comprising reference groups. The timing of the experiments was as short as possible due to the fact that our listeners were children. To date, no study has described results of such experiments for blind/visually handicapped children and teenagers. It was shown that the performance of blind/visually impaired participants was not as good as that of blind adults in pitch discrimination and pitch-timbre categorization tasks. These results may have implications for the development of auditory training in orientation and mobility of young visually handicapped people.