Can Drawings Really Facilitate Children’s Symbolic Understanding of Metaphor: The Impact of Drawing Skills and Metaphor Explicitness

Despite the numerous studies on children's symbolic understanding of metaphors, much remains unknown about the facilitating effect of drawings on the comprehension of metaphor and how it is associated with drawing skills and metaphor explicitness among young speakers of logo-graphic languages. To this end, 139 Chinese children between 7 and 11 year’s old were administered to three experimental conditions of draw-explain, explain-draw, and draw-explain-draw. The results indicate that high-drawing-skill children produced more symbolic but less literal interpretations than low-drawing-skill group, and children produced more symbolic but less literal interpretations of high explicit metaphors than low explicit ones. Moreover, children’s understanding of metaphors is facilitated and significantly influenced by their level of drawing skills and the degree of each metaphor’s explicitness. To be specific, drawings only increased the number of symbolic interpretations of high-drawing-skill children in their understanding of low and high explicit metaphors, but they did not work for low-drawing-skill children in their understanding of low explicit metaphors. An enhanced effect of repeated drawings was found on metaphorical comprehension, suggesting that alternating drawings and verbal interpretations could be more effective to facilitate metaphor understanding, especially for children with low drawing skills.