Investigating and Analyzing The Application of Image Schemas in The Blinds From Cognitive Perspective

In cognitive linguistics, the study of linguistic meaning is not the aim by itself. Instead in this field of linguistics, the focus is on understanding the nature of conceptual system of human's mind.  Noting that image schema due to its importance in understanding of abstract concepts are an important category in linguistic studies. This paper studies the embodied patterns of image schemas in the absolute congenital blind compared with their counterparts based on Johnson's embodied cognition theory (1987) in cognitive semantics.

The methodology of this quantitative research is comparative between two groups of blind and non-blinds.  Thus, 48 male and female blinds and non-blinds with diploma and graduate education aged 18- 28 years, due to the study of such variables as gender, education and age, were evaluated, and they were asked to describe 30 selected words based on Ricci Bitty and Poggi's  procedures (1991), then their image schemas were investigated.
Results and

The results showed that the blinds, due to lack of vision, use more lexical descriptions and more image schema than their counterparts, in a way, graduate female blinds were reported as the most frequent users of image schema. The statistics also prove that the path and cycle schema, among different types of schema proposed by Johnson (1987), have the most and the least amount of usage in both groups respectively. Also, the study showed that age, gender, education variables as influential factors had no effect on understanding blind people and their counterparts from the image schema.