Issues of understanding a literary text from a psycholinguistic perspective

Abstract

The article describes psycholinguistic methods used to model the processes of modern schoolchildren’s perception and comprehension of the text of A. P. Chekhov’s short story "The Death of a Government Clerk". We postulate that the processes of perceiving and understanding fictional texts are conditioned by several factors. These include the quality of the text itself, its size, the closeness of the work to recipients, recipients’ gender- and age-specific qualities, and the peculiarities of their conceptual systems. The research data are the results of two-stage psycholinguistic experiments conducted with the participation of Omsk secondary and vocational school students. The first stage was performed according to the method of semantic differential. It aimed to diagnose the process of emotional perception in the experimental subjects. In the second stage, the students had to answer questions concerning the basic semantic lines of the text. The first stage revealed an emotional attitude to the text and the influence of the gender factor. The former was manifested in different intensities of the evaluation parameters concentrated in the area of negative coefficients. The second stage showed the results of the comprehension process as the totality of gender-, socially, and psychologically determined interpretations of the semantic content of the text. The comprehension process is associated with choosing certain supports such as particular textual signs, the socio-psychological model of the author, the plot, and others.