A Study On The Embodied Effect Of Praise And Criticism On Semantic Cognition Of Chinese 5-7 Years Old Children With High Functioning Autism

According to the embodied cognition theory,embodied experience is the foundation of semantic cognition.Perceptual experience participates in semantic representation and processing in a metaphorical way.There have been a lot of studies to prove the reality of embodied cognition,which have found that both adults and children have metaphorical consistency in their semantic representation and perceptual experience.This implies that people will construct abstract semantics by virtue of the perceptual experience obtained from the interaction between subject and object,and use simple and figurative experience to represent complex and abstract semantic concepts.This study was conducted to investigate the embodied effect in positive and negative semantic cognition on 5-7 years old Mandarin-speaking children with highfunctioning autism(HFA),and discussed whether the semantic processing and the experience of the vertical spatial orientation are related in this group,and the role of embodied experience and language factors in their semantic processing.In this study,5-7 years old children with HFA were selected as subjects,and typically developing(TD)children with matching chronological age,total IQ,verbal IQ and performance IQ were selected as the control group.The study consisted of three experiments.In experiment 1,we investigated whether the subjects could represent the adjectives with positive or negative semantics by the vertical spatial orientation experience,that is,whether the spatial metaphor in the positive or negative semantic representation has psychological reality and whether there is a mapping from the spatial experience domain to the semantic domain.Experiment 2 provided the subjects with the priming of vertical spatial orientation,and investigated the influence of the empirical clues on their semantic processing,that is,whether there is a mapping from the semantic domain to the empirical spatial domain.Experiment 3 provided the subjects with context as the priming of language factor,and investigated the impact of contextual cues on the semantic processing of the subjects.The experimental results indicated children with HFA cannot form a bidirectional mapping between spatial experience and semantics as TD children.The processing of semantics did not prime their representation of spatial experience,but the processing of spatial experience primed their representation of semantics,which was different from TD children.There was no significant difference in the ability of HFA children to comprehend the semantics of spatial perception experience,but the utilization degree of "up" and "down" spatial experience was opposite to that of TD children.Finally,HFA children of this age were able to obtain semantics from contextual cues,but their ability to use contextual information was significantly weaker than that of TD children.Thus,5-7 years old HFA children are different from TD children in terms of embodied cognitive ability.However,their ability to acquire semantics through embodied experience cues was more similar to that of TD children than contextual cues.The specificity of semantic embodied effects in HFA children may be related to their abnormal perception.