A Study On The Influence Of Gesture On Preschool Children's Metaphor Understandin

According to embodied cognition,metaphorical understanding is based on thinking and cognitive activities under action cognition,where individuals present sensory-motor information as concrete action schemata,thereby enabling other individuals to understand the metaphorical meaning through action.Children’s metaphorical comprehension is based on children’s own perception,bodily movement of material,and social experiences;on the similarity of metaphor to its original meaning.Metaphorical gestures,as a physical action,help children understand abstract,intangible,and complex target domain concepts by using concrete,tangible,and simple source domain actions that present metaphorical similarities to the original meaning.To this end,this study aimed to investigate the effects of metaphorical gestures on preschool children’s metaphorical comprehension by examining two tasks:metaphorical vocabulary memorization and comprehension,and metaphorical sentence comprehension,analyzing the effects of metaphorical gestures on children’s metaphorical comprehension and the differences in comprehension of different types of metaphors by comparing the no-gesture group,using embodied cognition as an analytical framework to explore the causes,and providing scientific suggestions for proposing the use of gestures in actual teaching.Experiment 1 found that(1)gestures had a significant facilitative effect on children’s memory and comprehension of metaphors;(2)gestures had a type-specific effect on children’s memory and comprehension of metaphorical vocabulary.For metaphor vocabulary memory,gestures had the most significant effect on memory enhancement for plant metaphors;for metaphor vocabulary comprehension,gestures had the most significant effect on promoting comprehension for body metaphor type words;(3)gestures also promoted the maintenance effect of metaphor learning,and the maintenance memory effect was most significant only for animal metaphors and plant metaphors,and the maintenance comprehension effect was most significant only for plant metaphor words;Experiment 2 found that(1)gestures had a significant effect on children’s comprehending metaphorical sentences had a significant facilitating effect;(2)the effect of gesture on children’s metaphorical sentence comprehension had type differences and was most significant for enhancing the comprehension of orientation metaphors.Based on the influence of gestures on preschool children’s metaphorical comprehension and the developmental characteristics of preschool children’s metaphorical comprehension,relevant educational insights were drawn: to enhance teachers’ awareness and use of gestures;to consciously design and select gestures in instructional design;to maintain children’s attention with reasonable use of gestures;and to make good use of gestures in daily life to promote children’s visual experience.