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Blindness and psychological development in young children. Edited by Vicky Lewis & Glyn M. Collis. Leicester: BPS Books. 1997. Pp. 149. Paper 112.99. ISBN 1 85433 231 7.
Blindness poses some fundamental problems for psychologists interested in normal processes of cognitive, language, social and emotional development. These problems include questions about what 'atypical' development really is, questions about the role of experience in development and questions about the nature of domain specificity. Given the importance of these issues, it is surprising to find that there is relatively little research on psychological development in blind children. Hopefully, Lewis & Collis's edited volume, which addresses these important issues directly, will help to remedy this. The chapters in the book are very different from each other and when I first read them I found this diversity rather incongruous. The contents of the chapters include fundamental philosophical debate about the origins of knowledge (Landau, Chapter 2 and Locke, Chapter 3); empirical evidence on Braille reading (Millar, Chapter 4 and Harris & Barlow-Brown, Chapter 5), practical insights on social development (Preisler,...