MANY BLIND CHILDREN HAVE A WIDE VOCABULARY AND GOOD VERBAL ability, but relatively little attention has been paid to how they acquire it. The language of the sighted child is closely related to an experience of the world which is largely organized in visual terms. Can we share the blind child's experience of the world sufficiently to understand the way he copes with the learning of a language not altogether suited to his needs? We would expect that each phase in the early speech development of sighted children will occur at some stage in that of the blind child who acquires speech. However, in the blind some phases may occur later, for example, original phrase or sentence construction; while others may occur earlier, for example, precise mimicry. Phases which are fleeting in the sighted child's speech development may be more extended in that of the blind. An example of this would be the repetition, unchanged, of a sentence in circumstances which call for its modification.