Blind Speller Wins, No Matter What

Almost 300 pupils from around the country will summon up their courage and every vocabulary word they can remember for the start of the final rounds of the National Spelling Bee on Wednesday, June 1.

But this year, something is different, reports CBS News correspondent Joie Chen, who met a contestant who's a winner even before the bee begins.

You wouldn't know it to see her touring Washington's new American Indian Museum, but just about every step 14-year-old Christian Perez has taken to get there has been a challenge.

Like all the finalists, she studied hard. But she's faced a unique hurdle to becoming a championship speller: Total blindness.

A premature baby, Christian weighed less than two pounds and was blind at birth. She was just a toddler when her mother died. Soon after, she stopped talking to most people, and became what's known as a "selective mute." But her teachers saw something special.
Teacher Ellen Lopez says, "I always knew she was very smart. All her teachers have known she was very smart. She's risen to the occasion."

Lopez has known Christian since she was 3 and joined her as The Early Show took a peek at the final preparations for the bee.

Entering the ballroom with Chen, Christian tells the correspondent she feels the room is big. She's still a girl of few words. But she has an easy smile, and a teenager's confidence, even with a novice guide.

Bee organizers have made some adjustments for Christian. She will be led onstage. But then, she'll be like any other contestant in the finals: Sweating it out, butterflies in their stomachs, vowels swimming in their heads, hoping they've studied the right words.

Testing her on her skills, Chen gives her the word "quasaquicentennial," and she does an excellent job.

Christian says she learns the same way sighted spellers do: Connecting a new word to a familiar one, and imagining how it might look. But practicing with a Braille note machine is obviously different.

Will she be the last one standing? Christian smiles and says, "Maybe."

She faced the first round- 25 words - in a special Braille session Tuesday night. The other contestants take a written version Wednesday morning.

Winning the championship won't be easy. But for someone who's already faced so many hard tests, nothing seems off limits.

The competition ends June 2.