Units of a person’s mental lexicon and the nature of connections between them

In the modern world, the interest of the scientific world on the interdisciplinary basis of speech perception on the part of psychology and Philology has increased significantly. It should be noted that, despite the increasing role of the English language in Kazakhstan at the present time, this problem is probably the least developed. The purpose of the article is to describe the results of scientific research on the process of entering a foreign word into the system of internal lexicon of a student at the level of professional training. Methodology used: experimental (identification of the threshold of the "educational" lexical minimum) and comparative (comparison of associative fields of English words of the profile for students of the direction, in general 1500 lexical units) were used. From the results the data obtained allow us to identify the specifics of the entry of a foreign language word into the system of the student's internal lexicon at the professional level. Keywords: psycholinguistics, mental lexicon, internal dictionary, foreign language, connections

STUDY OF DYNAMIC PROCESSES IN THE INTERNAL VOCABULARY OF A SCHOOL STUDENT BY THE METHOD OF FREE ASSOCIATION EXPERIMENT

Statement of the problem and the purpose of the article. The development of language / speech ability is the basis for mastering any activity, especially educational one. Using the ideas of the Moscow psycholinguistic school, we believe the basic part of speech activity to be an internal or mental lexicon / vocabulary, allowing to simulate the language picture of the world, linguistic consciousness. Research methodology. The most effective way to study language consciousness, hence the internal lexicon, is the free association experiment (SAE). The experience of creating associative dictionaries as a result of mass association experiments is known in the world and in the country. The most famous associative dictionary in Russia is the Russian associative dictionary (RAS) 1994-1998. Since the end of the XX century, associative dictionaries for schoolchildren have been created in our country as a tool for studying the dynamic processes of the internal lexicon among schoolchildren of different age groups. Research results. The materials of the “Associative dictionary of Krasnoyarsk schoolchildren” as a model of internal lexicon allow us to study the reflection of thinking and understanding of the surrounding world by schoolchildren, the level of formation of cognitive structures. Psycholinguistic analysis of associative fields gives an idea of the level of formation of the conceptual apparatus, the image of the world. By analyzing associative fields as a fragment of the internal lexicon of a student of a certain age, you can plan activities to correct and develop the internal lexicon of a teenager.

Gongsun Longzi’s “Form”: Minimal Word Meaning

Inspired by Gongsun Longzi’s “form-naming” idea about word meaning, this paper argues that 1) the internal lexicon contains only the list of word-meaning pairs, with no additional information either as part of word meaning or as a structural level above it; 2) the meaning of word is a minimal C-Form, the identifying conceptual meaning that individuates a concept; 3) C-Form is the interface between word meaning and concept meaning; and 4) a sentence has a minimal semantic content, consisting of the minimal meanings of the words composing it, which is propositional and truth-evaluable, and contextual elements contribute nothing to the meaning of language expressions. This paper adheres to semantic minimalism, believing meanwhile that meaning holism helps in semantics inquiry, since reflection on language meaning differs from language meaning itself.

National-precedent name of Lesia Ukrainka woman in the reception of speakers

The author of the article studies the phenomenon of the precedent personality of Lesia Ukrainka as a culturally significant phenomenon of the national-linguistic picture of the world of Ukrainians in the reception of modern speakers. The author turned to the study of the internal lexicon of such authoritative native speakers as Oles Honchar, Oksana Zabuzhko on the example of the titles of works about Lesia Ukrainka. The textual interpretation of this culturally significant figure reflects the peculiarities of the perception of a particular historical and cultural personality as a motivator of a nationally marked precedent name. The change in the principles of studying the life and work of the writer is reflected in the differential features of her precedent name, already actualized in the headlines. The role of Ukrainian literature of the XIX – beg. XX century in the formation of a nationally conscious stratum of Ukrainian society and today remains decisive. Awareness of the national idea, its crystallization in the apt poetic word contributed to the unification of nationally indifferent citizens to build an ideologically united, conciliar state. Texts and ideas, images, sayings, sometimes written more than a hundred years ago, remain meaningful and relevant to the modern speaker. Analyzing the titles of articles and sections, we consider them as a kind of associative-verbal network, which illustrates the author’s thought-receptive actions and associations caused by the verbal motivator (proper name-stimulus) “Lesia Ukrainka”. Thanks to this approach, we can consider them as individual and as those that allow the identification and description of differential features that form the core of the precedent name, which actualizes a certain bundle of knowledge and assessments related to the precedent personality of Lesia Ukrainka in the linguistic consciousness of Oles Honchar and Oksana Zabuzhko.

PECULIARITIES OF THE CHARACTER’S INDIVIDUAL LEXICON OF THE LITERARY TEXT

Learning the character's linguistic personality is impossible without exploring its individual vocabulary. The study was based on the novels Pearl Buck "Imperial woman" and Pavlo Zagrebelniy "Roxolana". The main theoretical aspects of the concept of "character’s individual lexicon" are considered in the article. The terms "individual lexicon", "mental lexicon" and "internal lexicon" are specified. The comparative analysis of the individual lexicon of the real linguistic personality and character’s linguistic personality is carried out. The independent value of the character’s individual lexicon is determined. Analysis of the individual lexicon is performed at the morphological and syntactic level. For both heroines, concepts such as knowledge, hope, children, freedom, greatness (triumph), painting (singing) are most essential. In other cases, Roxolana's priorities are faith, native land, happiness, salvation. For Tzu Hsi - peace, triumph, debt, people. The individual lexicon of the character is characterized by the distinctive characteristics of the linguistic personality (the closeness of the list of lexical units, statical state of the system). The individual lexicons of the characters share common morphological indicators (nouns and verbs predominate). From the point of view of syntax the prevailing use of direct imperative forms in the communicative acts of the characters has been revealed (order, requirement Tzu Hsi - 48%, Roxolana -35%). In the speech of both characters in the analysis of the affirmative form of imperative is dominated by verbs of movement and auditory perception. Direct imperative forms testify to the highest situational and status position of both ladies. Threat sentences are more typical of Tzu Hsi. Indirect imperative forms (request, offer, advice, persuasion, praise, support and consolation) are dominant in Roxolana’s individual lexicon.

Suppression in interpreting adjective noun combinations and the nature of the lexicon

A common assumption about our internal lexicon is that the meaning of words is underspecified and this underspecified representation is filled in based on the context in which the word occurs. In this paper I would like to explore a different hypothesis, that words are stored with overspecified representations which are ‘trimmed down’ by the context. This view seems to be in line with a well-known mechanism from psycholinguistics: suppression. Many studies have shown that conceptual properties of a word are initially activated but subsequently suppressed when these properties are in conflict with the context the word occurs in. This mechanism has not been tested, however, in a context where compositional application takes place as between an adjective and a noun. In this study I will discuss two lexical decision experiments testing the interpretation of two types of adjective noun combinations. For both types of combinations it is expected that the representation of the noun undergoes a change due to the conflicting information provided by the adjective. It is hypothesized that the properties of the noun that are in conflict with the adjective are initially activated, but subsequently suppressed to form a coherent representation of the adjective noun combination. While the results provide evidence for the initial activation of the conceptual properties, no evidence for the subsequent suppression was found. The initial activation shows that also in the case of adjective noun combinations, conceptual features do not ‘wait for’ an initial well-formed semantic structure. The lack of evidence for suppression primarily suggests the need for further research. If future experiments confirm that suppression does not take place within the time frame tested in the experiments, we must conclude, based on experimental findings by Schumacher (2013), that conceptual specification takes place after the shift in reference of the noun.

The growth of children’s semantic and phonological networks: insight from 10 languages

Children tend to produce words earlier when they are connected to a variety of other words along the phonological and semantic dimensions. Though these semantic and phonological connectivity effects have been extensively documented, little is known about their underlying developmental mechanism. One possibility is that learning is driven by lexical network growth where highly connected words in the child's early lexicon enable learning of similar words. Another possibility is that learning is driven by highly connected words in the external learning environment, instead of highly connected words in the early internal lexicon. The present study tests both scenarios systematically in both the phonological and semantic domains across 10 languages. We show that phonological and semantic connectivity in the learning environment drives growth in both production- and comprehension-based vocabularies, even controlling for word frequency and length. This pattern of findings suggests a word learning process where children harness their statistical learning abilities to detect and learn highly connected words in the learning environment.