Lexical references to sensory modalities in verbal descriptions of people and objects by congenitally blind late blind and sighted adults

Background:Some previous studies have revealed that while congenitally blind people have a tendency to refer to visual attributes ('verbalism'), references to auditory and tactile attributes are scarcer. However, this statement may be challenged by current theories claiming that cognition is linked to the perceptions and actions from which it derives. Verbal productions by the blind could therefore differ from those of the sighted because of their specific perceptual experience. The relative weight of each sense in oral descriptions was compared in three groups with different visual experience Congenitally blind (CB), late blind (LB) and blindfolded sighted (BS) adults. Methodology/Principal Findings:Participants were asked to give an oral description of their mother and their father, and of four familiar manually- explored objects. The number of visual references obtained when describing people was relatively high, and was the same in the CB and BS groups ("verbalism" in )