Investigating meaning construal in the language of the blind: a cognitive linguistic perspective
Investigating meaning construal in the language of the blind: a cognitive linguistic perspective

Summary/Abstract: This paper describes and discusses issues pertaining to investigating meaning construal in the language of the blind. It introduces key problems in this largely unexplored area and proposes possible avenues of research by outlining four studies conducted over a period of eight years. The central arguments are built around the fundamental cognitive linguistic premise that language is an experiential phenomenon intimately related to general cognitive processes. The author focuses on the role of salience (or attention) and demonstrates how it is coded in the language of the blind. The main part of the paper starts with the outline of two exploratory studies the aim of which was to identify possible differences in salience and situatedness. The author discusses the contribution of the two studies and proceeds by describing a more focused study whose hypotheses were motivated by some of the questions raised in the previous two studies. The primary research question was related to the idea of the primacy of space in the blinds’ mental imagery and meaning construal. Finally, the author proposes a model integrating key language internal and language external factors affecting the process of meaning construal in this extraordinary population, and finishes by describing the fourth study whose primary aim was to double– test the research instrument used to investigate spatial (topological) elements in the language of the blind.

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