A Study On Chinese Preschool Children’s Comprehension Of Spatial Time Metaphors

Lakoff and Johnson stated in Metaphors We Live By that metaphor exists inlanguage and is a fundamental way of thinking and a crucial cognitive tool for humanto know the world. People understand abstract concepts such as TIME based onconcrete concepts such as SPACE.SPACE and TIME are two of the most basic concepts human master in the processof knowing the world. Children experience physical motions in SPACE at an early age.When mapping this experience to target domain TIME, they get spatial-time metaphor.In the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the mapping from source domainSPACE to target domain TIME has been studied for decades, i.e. spatial timemetaphors. According to previous researches, there are three most common types ofspatial time metaphor: moving ego metaphor (e.g. We are entering a new age), movingtime metaphor(e.g. Christmas is approaching) and sequence-as-position metaphor(e.g.New Year follows Christmas). A great number of studies have rich achievement on thistheory based on adults while few on children.This paper aims at studying the developmental changes of Chinese pre-schoolchildren’s comprehension on spatial time metaphors and asking whether metaphortypes have an effect on children’s metaphor comprehension and abilities. Theparticipants of this research are3-5years old children divided into three age groups,15in every group. The research uses picture-matching task and forced-choice task tocollect data and SPSS16.0to analyze data. The main measurements are descriptivestatistics, paired-samples T Test and one-way ANOVA. Then, the paper comes to thefollowing conclusions:3-year-old and4-year-old children can well understand movingego metaphor and moving time metaphor, but have some difficulties in understandingsequence-as-position metaphor.5-year-old children have significantly differentperformance in the task. They get higher scores than3and4years old children onmoving ego metaphor and moving time metaphor, and understand thesequence-as-position metaphor sentences significantly better. Cognitive abilities get arapid development in this stage.