The Depiction of Wheels by Blind Children: Preliminary Studies on Pictorial Metaphors, Language, and Embodied Imagery

Abstract

Blind (and visually impaired) children make use of perceptual cues from multimodal sensory input of known objects when they draw. In this study, we examined drawings of spinning wheels made by 12-year-old congenitally blind children. The drawings can be analyzed in terms of metaphoric and metonymic mappings from perceptual cues of different objects. Just as metaphoric language is understood through embodiment, the drawings are made through embodiment or perceptual symbolic simulations that have their parallel in language. We considered the relation between metaphor in haptic drawings and language from the perspective of situated simulation in which imagery, motion, and introspection play a crucial role in the shaping of concepts. Reference corpora offer evidence of the verbal correlates of such simulations in English and Spanish.