Understanding of metaphorical time pattern among medical and paramedical students. based on gender, age and academic status

Metaphor is a systematic relationship between two conceptual domains. In metaphor; an experimental or sensual domain called source domain, is related to another domain as target domain. The purpose of this study was to review understanding of metaphorical time pattern in the medical and paramedical students based on gender, age and academic status.

This descriptive study included 120 medical and paramedical students of Tehran medical university with minimum undergraduate university degree. Time metaphorical pattern questionnaire which had been designed by Raiisi (2019) on the basis of time metaphor corpus analysis included 3 subscales of object, place and matter. Pearson correlation test, T test, analysis of one-way variance and post hoc test (least significant difference) were used for data analysis.

The results showed that there was no difference between gender and understanding of metaphorical time pattern. Higher educational levels (from undergraduate to postgraduate and specialty courses) led to better understanding of metaphorical time pattern in Persian speaker students. Students of higher age showed improved understanding of metaphorical time pattern in relation to the object subclass.

Perception of the time is not dependent on gender but can be improved with increasing age and higher academic levels.