American Academy of Pediatrics lies to us once again....
“If caregivers are wearing masks, does that harm kids’ language development? No. There is no evidence of this. And we know even visually impaired children develop speech and language at the same rate as their peers.” This is a textbook case of the Law of No Evidence. Or it would be, if there wasn’t any Proper Scientific Evidence.
Is it, though? I’m no expert, but I tried to find Relevant Literature. Sometimes, counterintuitive things are true.
Blindness affects congenitally blind children’s development in different ways, language development being one of the areas less affected by the lack of vision.
Most researchers have agreed upon the fact that blind children’s morphological development, with the exception of personal and possessive pronouns, is not delayed nor impaired in comparison to that of sighted children, although it is different. As for syntactic development, comparisons of MLU scores throughout development indicate that blind children are not delayed when compared to sighted children Blind children use language with similar functions, and learn to perform these functions at the same age as sighted children. Nevertheless, some differences exist up until 4;6 years; these are connected to the adaptive strategies that blind children put into practice, and/or to their limited access to information about external reality. However these differences disappear with time (Pérez-Pereira & Castro, 1997). The main early difference is that blind children tend to use self-oriented language instead of externally oriented language.
I don’t know exactly where that leaves us evidentially. Perhaps the AAP is lying by omission by not telling us about things other than language that are affected by children’s sight.
That’s a bit different to the dishonesty alleged, though.
Is it, though? I’m no expert, but I tried to find Relevant Literature. Sometimes, counterintuitive things are true.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220009177_Language_Development_in_Blind_Children:
I don’t know exactly where that leaves us evidentially. Perhaps the AAP is lying by omission by not telling us about things other than language that are affected by children’s sight.
That’s a bit different to the dishonesty alleged, though.