A Study On Metaphor And Metonymy Of Autistic Children In Chinese

The current study is aimed to make a comprehensive approach to the competences and defects of metaphor and metonymy comprehension in Chinese autistic children, compare their performances on metaphor and metonymy comprehension, analysis the underlying reasons from the view of semantic knowledge.Therefore, our research respectively selected15Chinese children with autism and15typically developing children, who were matched by chronological age, verbal IQ, performance IQ and full IQ. We overall investigated and compared the representations of metaphor and metonymy understanding and the level of receptive vocabulary knowledge in Chinese autistic children and typically developing children, separately using the metaphor and metonymy comprehension task and the semantic knowledge task. The results of these experiments are as follows:In the task of metaphor and metonymy comprehension, this study found:Firstly, Chinese autistic children showed worse integrative manifestations than typically developing children. Not only the understanding of metaphors and metonymy in Chinese children with autism was impaired, but also the metonymy comprehension in Chinese autistic children was more severely affected. It is considered that it might be relevant to the linguistic forms and utterance essence of metaphor and metonymy. Secondly, Chinese children with autism’s performances were inferior to typically developing children in the conventional condition, whereas the presentations within the autistic group behaved similarly in novel and conventional conditions. We interpreted this phenomenon as Chinese autistic children’s semantic representation form was probably abnormal, and they could not manage semantic coding or searching well, then those children could not process semantic knowledge efficiently. Thirdly, just as typically developing children, Chinese children with autism became more dependent on semantic knowledge in understanding metaphors by contrast with metonymy. Then, the manifestations of metaphor comprehension were different between novel and conventional situations, while there were no significant differences in the metonymy comprehension performances between two figurative degree conditions.In the semantic knowledge task, its consequences indicated:Firstly, like typically developing children, Chinese autistic children’s receptive vocabulary knowledge level was only remarkably correlated with their performances on metaphor but not metonymy comprehension. It proved, compared with metonymy, children understood metaphors more depending on their semantic knowledge. Secondly, contrary to typically developing children, Chinese autistic children’s receptive vocabulary knowledge level was obviously related to their novel but not conventional metaphor comprehension manifestations. The reason for that may be their abnormality in the way of semantic representation, existing disorders on semantic processing and dealing with semantic knowledge different from typically developing children, which led them to understanding metaphors in a special strategy. Thus, receptive vocabulary capacity couldn’t exactly predict the Chinese children with autism’s metaphor comprehension performances, even if they possessed the same receptive vocabulary competence as typically developing children.In summary, we hold that Chinese autistic children have defects in both metaphor and metonymy comprehension, and the impairments on metonymy understanding seem to be more serious. Chinese children with autism apprehend metaphors more depending on their semantic knowledge than metonymy, and the level of their receptive vocabulary knowledge is merely significantly relevant to their manifestations of metaphor comprehension. However, Chinese autistic children’s receptive vocabulary capacity can not completely predict their performances on metaphor understanding. They may have a anomalous semantic representation form, and be dysfunctional in semantic processing, so they apprehend metaphors in a different strategy.