P38: The Night’s Story. The impact of blindness on the lexical richness of the work of Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

Introduction and Objectives: Vision plays an important role in theories of cognitive development and language acquisition. Studies on acquired blindness have shown a negative impact on the outcome of semantic and phonological fluency tasks in those who suffer from it. The Objectives of our work was to evaluate the potential effect of visual deficit on the lexical richness (quantity of different words or lexical units) of the work of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (JLB).

Material and Methods: Verses and prose texts by JLB (complete works of stories and poetry) were analyzed. The total number of words used was counted, and within them, the number of unique words (numbered words without counting their repetitions) was quantified using the Unique Word calculator tool from Planet Calc®. The results obtained after the period in which his blindness prevented him from reading texts were compared with the data obtained from his previous literary production. Statistical results were obtained using SPSS software. Means, standard deviations, and the result of a t-test were calculated.

Results: Data from 3 books of stories and 3 poetry books written between the years 1923 and 1949 (a period in which he still retained his reading ability) were collected, as well as data from 3 books of stories and 10 poetry books from his post-blindness period (starting from 1955). A total of 93446 and 59749 total words were obtained from the pre and post-blindness periods, respectively, with a total of 39887 and 24610 unique words from the mentioned periods. A percentage of unique words over total words was calculated for both periods, and a T-test for related measures was conducted. Although a lower percentage was observed in both the narratives between the pre-blindness stage (M = 45.09%; SD = 6.8%) and post-blindness stage (M = 40.92%; SD = 4.7%), as well as in the poems pre-blindness stage (40.92% SD 4%) and post-blindness stage (32.57% SD 4.5%), this difference was not statisticallysignificant(narrativesp = 0.155;poems p = 0.106).

Conclusions: The analysis of the comparison between pre-and post-blindness stages of lexical richness in JLB’s writing does not align with the fluency deficit reported in the literature. The continuity of his active intellectual life may have influenced his lexical performance through compensatory mechanisms.