Study On Comparison And Development Of Sense Of Metaphor Of Popular Children And Rejected Children

Peer acceptance is an important part of children’s peer relationship and it plays a large role in children’s social development. Current studies on peer acceptance mainly focus on its influences and have made some great achievements, but no research studies the peer acceptance from the perspective of richness of personality. This study tries to start with metaphor to do the research. Metaphor is widely used in our daily life. It is not only a kind of common language phenomenon, but also a way of thinking. In the field of Developmental Psychology, a large number of related studies on metaphor aim to reveal the characteristics and laws of children’s metaphor development, which tend to show the cognitive development. However, there is less study on the level of richness from horizontal. Therefore, this study intends to explore children’s richness development through the comparison of sense of metaphor between popular children and rejected children, and to give reference for children’s potential cultivation.This study selects 72 popular children and rejected children from grade three to grade five as participants by means of peer nomination. Their sense of metaphor are investigated by self-made test including poetic feeling, knowledge metaphor and humor communication, which measured by poetic preference, metaphor preference and humorous situation projection respectively. In addition, participants’ extracurricular reading is also taken into account to analyze the formative factors of sense of metaphor on popular children and rejected children. The results indicated some conclusions as follows:(1) Popular children and rejected children show a big difference on reactions to humorous situation projection. The former encode social clues in a more comprehensive way, so they can better decode situations and understand the humor. However, the latter often encode social clues in a partial way, and pay more attention to the initial conflict clues.(2) Popular children and rejected children show a big difference on preferences of literature metaphor. The former are more willing to give free rein to their imagination to literature, but the latter’s interest of imagination is poorer.(3) Participants’ extracurricular reading is closely related to their sense of metaphor and the more you read and describe, the more popular you are in peer groups. It shows that reading can affect children’s peer interaction.(4) The sense of metaphor towards literature of children from grade three to grade five generally shows a declining trend. That is to say, the poetic feeling, the interest of fairy tales’ imagination and the creativity in the process of metaphor are weakened in grade four. This result reminds that children’s literature imagination should be cultivated before grade three and that grade four students’ potential on imagination of fairy tales begins to decline.