The visually impaired young child with additional handicaps experiences great difficulty in learning to communicate. Self-stimulation, withdrawal, and other maladaptive behaviors accompany the failure to develop communication and social interaction. Social interactions encourage and develop awareness and attention to others; anticipation and intention enable the visually impaired multihandicapped child to communicate with his or her social environment. Social routines based on rhyming verses combined with co-active participation with adults were developed to permit these children to associate communicative responses with attention to and action on objects.
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