Children with congenital visual impairments (VI) may experience some early delays in the acquisition of language, but by school age these problems are largely resolved. Children with VI may also learn to read with the help of specially adapted writing systems such as Braille and computer programs that convert text to speech. However, pragmatic skills are vulnerable in children with VI and there is increasing evidence that many social-communication behaviors in VI resemble those seen in sighted children with ASD.

Science Direct, Pubmed, CINAHL, PsycINFO, ProQuest, Web of Science, and Google Scholar (2010 through 2017) were searched for English-language studies using a list of keywords. The books about medicine, speech therapy were studied too.

Early differences in language acquisition may be attributable in part to disruptions in early visual experiences, for example triadic joint attention. As a result, toddlers with VI are delayed in their acquisition of first words and phrases. Despite these early delays, previous research has consistently demonstrated that children with VI develop age appropriate vocabularies and MLUs by their third birthday. However, use of language may be disrupted. Other pragmatic impairments include the extensive, and sometimes inappropriate, use of questions; a paucity of communicative gestures; and extensive use of imitative speech, repetitions, and verbal routines.

Given these findings, the role of the Speech Therapy will likely involve facilitating early social-communicative exchanges between parents and their children with VI. This may involve helping parents to recognize and explicitly comment on and reinforce nonverbal communication behaviors they themselves emit or observe in their children. It will also be necessary to help families find alternative ways of establishing joint attention and using these opportunities to provide rich linguistic stimulation.