Influence of Anxiety on Texts Retelling in Adolescents

Abstract

The signs of anxiety in ontogeny have not yet been sufficiently studied, as well as the indicators of anxiety in a certain age group in speech ontogeny. The hypothesis about the influence of schoolchildren’s anxiety on the text retelling process is set forth. Examining transcripts of oral retelling evidence that psychological conditions of adolescents affect their speech production. The material for this study was collected according to mass experiments, which were conducted in several secondary schools of the Republic of Tatarstan in 2020-2021. All in all, there were interviewed 458 students of the 5th grade aged from 11 to 12 years. Boys and girls were interviewed in almost equal proportions what allows speaking about gender representativeness. In order to design socio-psychological portraits of the respondents, there have been conducted a number of supplementary tests preceding the main interviews: the general awareness test, the anxiety test, the test on concentration and attention span, the Russian language test. Our research of anxiety of adolescents is based on the Integrative Anxiety Test which followed the Encyclopedia of Psychodiagnostics (ed. D. Raigorodsky). The main target of the experiment is to explore the alterations in the propositional structures integrity in text retelling that may happen as a result of anxiety influence. Having analyzed more than 300 text retellings, we have concluded that psychological factors may affect the mechanisms of information processing and verbalization. There are two types of anxiety manifestations in text retellings in adolescents. First, manifestations of anxiety on the superficial level which is revealed in alterations in the sound and lexical matter. Second, typical are the manifestations of anxiety on the deep level of propositions with complete change of semantic roles, appearance of additional propositional elements or fragmentation of existing propositions.