An Intervention Study On The Metaphorical Comprehension Ability Of Chinese Children With High Functioning Autism

The current study is aimed to explore the promotional role of the semantic knowledge intervention to metaphor comprehension in Mandarin-speaking children with High-functioning autism.Through the application of semantic knowledge intervention program,the study compares different types of metaphor understanding expression,and further studies the influence of semantic knowledge on children's metaphorical understanding.Therefore,this study selected four Mandarin-speaking children with High-functioning autism boy for intervention experiment object,who were matched by chronological age,verbal IQ,performance IQ,full IQ,receptive vocabulary knowledge adn metaphor comprehension.The experiment uses single test method single-baseline multiple experimental design.The independent variable is the semantic knowledge intervention program,and the dependent variable is the manifestation of the metaphorical understanding of the experimental object using semantic knowledge.Based on assessment and intervention experiment,we collected a large number of corpus,investigated the semantic knowledge intervention on the influence of children's metaphor comprehension,compared metaphor understanding in different degree of conventional and structural types.The results of these experiments are as follows:In the analysis of the intervention effect of metaphor comprehension ability,the comprehension ability of the experimental object was obviously improved.During the whole process of intervention,the four subjects presented obvious intervention effects.In addition to the difficult metaphorical structure,the experimental subjects were able to make a reasonable explanation and clear the expression in the intervention.However,during the period of maintenance,the score was slightly lower than the intervention period,which failed to maintain the same level of intervention.This may be due to the weak generalization ability of the experimental object,unable to fully grasp the comprehension ability of metaphor,and can only do metaphorical reasoning after the withdrawal of intervention,but cannot establish the appropriate similarity point for interpretation.In the analysis of different types of metaphor comprehension ability:Firstly,under the condition of different types of learning,the understanding of metaphor structures those were studied is better than structures not studied,showed that though subjects mastered metaphor comprehension ability after the intervention,but it was lacking migration in the initial stage,failing to generalize to other metaphors;Under the condition of different degree of conventional type,there was no significant difference between the understanding of conventional metaphor and the understanding of novel metaphor,it may be that the high-functioning autistic children didn't storage semantic knowledge.It need to "online" process or code semantic knowledge to comprehend metaphor;Under the condition of different structure types,the metaphorical understanding based on psychological similarity is weaker than the metaphorical understanding of physical similarity,which is related to the abstract nature of the structure itself.Therefore,this study suggests that semantic knowledge,especially the semantic representation,has obvious intervention effects on the metaphorical understanding of Mandarin-speaking children with High-functioning autism,which can influence children's metaphorical ability.Comprehension of metaphor structure is not only influenced by semantic knowledge,but also related to various structures and types.The ability of metaphor comprehension needs to be strengthened to be perfected.