Exploring Children's Understanding Of The Meaning Of Metaphor And Their Cognitive Process Of Metaphor Understanding

Metaphor is a kind of common linguistic phenomenon. Traditional study usually considers metaphor as a kind of rhetoric. Since 1970s, however, a variety of disciplines, such as rhetoric, philosophy, linguistic and psychology, have extensively paid attention to metaphor study. And the focus of metaphor study shifted from rhetoric and semantic perspectives to cognitive and pragmatic perspectives.An important study-field of westen metaphor study is to explore cognitive process of metaphor understanding. At present, four significant cognitive theories of metaphor understanding have been constructed, including Pragmatic Model, Conceptual Metaphor Model, Mapping Model and Categorization Model. During the cource of debating and compromising of Mapping Model and Categorization Model, researchers have found two substantial factors, conventionality and aptness, which influence the cognitive process of metaphor understanding.Former research indicates that the difficulty of metaphor influnces children' s metaphor understanding. Certain kind of cognitive prerequisite is needed for children understanding metaphor. Cognitive capabilities, such as class-inclusion, analogy, perception and working-memory,are essential for children' s metaphor understanding. Context information is also essential for children' s metaphor understanding. The more young, the more children will use context information to understand metaphor. And only together with specific context, the meaning of metaphor is definite. Besides, former research suggests that simile can improve children' s metaphor understanding.On the basis of controlling aptness , differentiating difficulty and conventionality, the present study use story reading .which is often used in previous reseaches, to examine children' s understanding of metaphor of different difficulty and conventionality, and to analyse the development of the children' s cognitive process of metaphor understanding. Subjects of the study include three groups, that is, 6, 9 and 11 years old. The results indiate that children' s capacity of understanding metaphor increases with age, and children can' t understand metaphor till 11 years old; that children' s understanding is influenced by difficulty and conventionality, and there is no obvious advancing of simile for metaphor understanding; that children' s cognitive process of metaphor understanding is different among three age groups, the cognitive process of 6, 9 years old is comparison process, and the cognitive process of 11 years old is near to adult model.