In the present study, we address the perceptual basis for developing abstract concepts by investigating if there are any differences in the way sighted and blind 10-year-olds conceptualize some basic musical relations. Thirty-four sighted and nine blind US elementary school students (seven congenitally blind) were exposed to 10 diametrically-opposed musical stimuli (a high and low tone, a quick and slow succession of pitches, a major and minor chord, and so on) and asked to verbally describe what the first and what the second part of the sequence sounded like. Upon transcription, their verbalizations were classified into higher-order conceptual categories. Distributions of responses so grouped were then compared. Results support the theoretical position that metaphorization is the principal mechanism in conceptualizing musical elements, and suggest a preference for visuo-spatial descriptions of the sequences. While sighted children's verbalizations seemed more referential and took less time to produce overall, the conceptual categories in the two groups reveal no differences. We suggest three possible explanations for this result: (1) the studied concepts might be more abstractly spatial, rather than visually-grounded, for both populations; (2) the concepts might derive from visuo-spatial stimulation for the sighted, and more generally embodied experience in the blind, which however produces the same linguistic output; (3) the concepts might be visuo-spatial in the sighted, and the blind could have adopted the terminology upon hearing it from the sighted, irrespective of their own sensory experience.
When children tell stories, they gesture; their gestures can predict how their narrative abilities will progress. Five-year-olds who gestured from the point of view of a character (CVPT gesture) when telling stories produced better-structured narratives at later ages (Demir, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2014). But does gesture just predict narrative structure, or can asking children to gesture in a particular way change their narratives? To explore this question, we instructed children to produce CVPT gestures and measured their narrative structure. Forty-four kindergarteners were asked to tell stories after being trained to produce CVPT gestures, gestures from an observer’s viewpoint (OVPT gestures), or after no instruction in gesture. Gestures were coded as CVPT or OVPT, and stories were scored for narrative structure. Children trained to produce CVPT gestures produced more of these gestures, and also had higher narrative structure scores compared to those who received the OVPT training. Children returned for a follow-up session one week later and narrated the stories again. The training received in the first session did not impact narrative structure or recall for the events of the stories. Overall, these results suggest a brief gestural intervention has the potential to enhance narrative structure. Due to the fact that stronger narrative abilities have been correlated with greater success in developing writing and reading skills at later ages, this research has important implications for literacy and education.
The present paper investigates whether lexicalized visuo-spatial configurations and/or an explicit reference to a human body part can facilitate the interpretation of unknown idioms by comparing the levels of correct interpretation of unknown English and Serbian idiomatic expressions. Two groups of respondents, American and Serbian engineering students, had the task to interpret literally translated idiomatic expressions from a target language they were not familiar with (Serbian or English). The idioms were divided into three groups: (1) visuo-spatial bodily idioms, (2) bodily idioms only, and (3) non-bodily idioms. The goal was to test whether references to visuo-spatial information and/or parts of the body would help respondents interpret the expressions correctly. Our results, compiled from both groups of respondents, suggest that there are significant differences for the three scores, with the combined visuo-spatial and bodily components taking the lead, the bodily component only coming second, and the non-bodily idioms falling strikingly far behind. This could provide support to the well-known assumptions of cognitive linguistics that visuo-spatial configurations and embodiment play a major role in the construction of abstract concepts.
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