“Not alone in the trauma” … the restorative power of collective thinking and sense-making through socioanalytic methodologies held online in disturbed times

The term “native speaker” is now widely used in the world testing practice. It is declared as a particular starting point in the evaluation of language proficiency level in the most widely spread testing systems (TRFL, OPI, SOLOM, STAMP, etc). At the same time, researchers mention ambiguity, vagueness and uncertainty of this concept. There is neither a generally accepted definition, nor reliable methodically grounded criteria for determining this level. It is not clear whether the status of a native speaker is a person’s “biographical” or “competence-based” characteristic. There are no studies devoted to the identification, research and systemization of criteria for determining a “native speaker’s” level of the Russian language proficiency. At the same time, the solution of these problems in the Russian testing practice is both scientifically and practically important. The state system of standards for Russian as a foreign language remains incomplete due to the lack of linguo-didactic description of mastering the Russian language at level 4, which is equivalent to a native speaker of Russian, the bearer of the Russian language culture. There is no reliable basis for assigning the status of a native speaker to people who are entitled to a fast track procedure for obtaining the Russian citizenship according to the Russian legislation. The study of the real discursive activity of native and non-native speakers of Russian and the comparative analysis of their communicative competence, demonstrated by the groups of test takers who were involved in the experiment, allowed the authors to identify the distinctive features of the highest level of the Russian language proficiency and to propose a system of criteria for determining it.

Non-native speakers’ sensitivity to discourse-level cues in pronoun interpretation has not been widely researched. We carried out three antecedent-choice questionnaire experiments which investigate the impact of focus on within-sentence pronoun resolution in native and non-native speakers of German and native speakers of Russian. Focus was realized via cleft structures and focus-sensitive particles (FSPs). Findings show a clear difference between native and non-native speakers that is not attributable to first language (L1) influence. Native speakers of German and Russian were less likely to resolve the pronoun to an antecedent in focus via a cleft compared to a non-focused antecedent in the same position (the ‘anti-focus effect’). Unlike the native speakers, non-native speakers did not show an anti-focus effect with clefts but showed a tendency to resolve a pronoun to an antecedent appearing with an FSP. We argue that non-native speakers do not always complete a detailed analysis of the information structural cues when seeking an antecedent and may instead be influenced by surface-level cues that highlight certain antecedents.

Phonological neutralization by native and non-native speakers: The case of Russian final devoicing

We collected production data from monolingual English speakers who were trained to produce a foreign accent of English, specifically Russian English (RE). First, the subjects read a paragraph in their own accent (baseline). Second, they listened to recordings of English sentences produced by a native speaker of Russian; next, the sentences were replayed, and the subjects imitated each sentence after hearing it. Finally, they were instructed to read the baseline sentences again (without audio prompts), trying their best to reproduce the RE accent. Several acoustic analyses are underway, addressing (a) vowel characteristics, (b) realization of stops, and (c) intonation patterns. Preliminary results show considerable differences in speakers' performance. The questions we address based on the data collected are (1) is there a continuous or more categorical change in speakers' ability to reproduce the RE accent? (2) which aspects of RE are most salient to native English speakers?, and (3) is there a correlation in quality and quantity such that speakers who pick up on more cues also produce them in more native-like manner? Our goal is to develop an algorithm to predict a given speaker's accentedness, and compare its performance with native speakers' accentedness ratings in a follow-up perceptual experiment. We collected production data from monolingual English speakers who were trained to produce a foreign accent of English, specifically Russian English (RE). First, the subjects read a paragraph in their own accent (baseline). Second, they listened to recordings of English sentences produced by a native speaker of Russian; next, the sentences were replayed, and the subjects imitated each sentence after hearing it. Finally, they were instructed to read the baseline sentences again (without audio prompts), trying their best to reproduce the RE accent. Several acoustic analyses are underway, addressing (a) vowel characteristics, (b) realization of stops, and (c) intonation patterns. Preliminary results show considerable differences in speakers' performance. The questions we address based on the data collected are (1) is there a continuous or more categorical change in speakers' ability to reproduce the RE accent? (2) which aspects of RE are most salient to native English speakers?, and (3) is there a correlatio...

This paper aimed to study the content of the concept of wife in Russian and English-speaking linguocultures. The research will broaden the understanding of linguistic consciousness of Russian and English native speakers as well as identify some peculiarities of their world image. It is important to study the national world image today, as it can help to improve mutual understanding between cultures and simplify the assimilation process for those who decide to immigrate for some reason or other. The author utilized the methods of linguocultural and comparative analysis, as well as of associative-verbal nets study suggested by Yu.N. Karaulov. They include comparing associative-verbal nets by respondents’ first two reactions, identifying the most frequent types of answers, and grouping the responses into semantic zones. Further, the article analyses the synonymic chains of the word wife and explains the significance of this concept in Russian and English-speaking linguocultures, as well as identifies common semantic groups for the concept (wedding, household) and determines a common response to the stimulus in the two linguocultures. In addition, the paper traces differences in the perception of the concept of wife and singles out various semantic zones and their key elements. The research found that for many Russian native speakers, this concept contains such features as faith and belonging to someone, while in English linguistic consciousness it includes gender and partnership.

The present study examines the relationship between second language (L2) proficiency and pausing patterns (i.e., pause duration, frequency, and distribution) in the speech of 30 Russian speakers of English performing two oral tasks—a topic narrative and a cartoon description—in Russian and in English. The subjects were divided into two oral English proficiency groups, high and intermediate, on the basis of a standardized test of spoken English. Baseline data were collected from a control group of 20 native English speakers. Statistical analyses were performed to determine: (a) the native norms of pause duration, frequency, and distribution for Russian and English on the two experimental tasks; (b) the effect of the level of L2 proficiency (high and intermediate) on the pausing of Russian speakers in English; and (c) the differences or similarities in pausing exhibited by native English speakers and native Russian speakers (with two different levels of English proficiency) when speaking English. The results of this study indicate that English and Russian informal monologue speech can be characterized as having different pausing conventions, thus suggesting that crosslinguistic differences involve, among many other aspects, contrasts in pausing patterns. Additionally, L2 proficiency was found to affect the pause duration of advanced nonnative speakers in that they were able to adjust the duration of their pauses in English to produce a nativelike pausing norm. It was also found that even highly proficient L2 speakers pause more frequently in their L2 than in their first language (L1). The examination of pause distribution patterns suggests that persons of intermediate to high L2 speaking proficiency make the same number of within-constituent pauses as native speakers. Overall, the findings of this study support the view that adherence to the target language pausing norms may lead to the perception of nonnative speech as more fluent and nativelike. The findings also highlight the importance of exposing L2 students to a richer variety of situations that illustrate native patterns of verbal communication.

Russian palatalized and unpalatalized coda consonants: An electropalatographic and acoustic analysis of native speaker and L2 learner productions

The research deals with natural perception of word boundaries by native speakers of Standard Russian. A specific feature of Russian word rhythmic structure is a so-called “prosodic core”: not only stressed, but also first pre-stressed vowels differ in duration and quality from vowels that occur in other positions, a phenomenon that is also commonly described as two degrees of reduction. The purpose of this study is to find out whether native Russian speakers are able to use acoustic differences between vowels [ɐ] (Degree 1 reduction) and [ə] (Degree 2 reduction) in order to recognize word boundaries correctly. The stimuli for the experiment were nonce words, five-syllable sequences including two stressed vowels; they were presented to the participants of the experiment in a form of fictional foreign names. The listeners were asked to choose between two possible ways of segmentation of these five-syllable sequences into a first name and a second name of a person. The results of the experiment show that native Russian speakers used the acoustic differences between vowels for segmentation, but the results were statistically significant only for some of the stimuli. However, for half of stimuli the listeners performed correct segmentation at chance level. In addition, artificial modification of first pre-stressed vowel duration was performed for some of the stimuli; the participants’ responses show that vowel duration influences the degree of success in the segmentation task.

The perception of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) mid vowels is mainly investigated by foreign researchers who work with learners of Brazilian Portuguese, native speakers of English or Spanish. In Brazil, this field has been poorly explored. This work contributes to filling this gap by investigating the perception of two Brazilian Portuguese minimal vowel pairs in the group of 103 native Russian speakers and nine French speakers, most of them residing in Brazil. The test has been designed to evaluate the perception of the mid high and low front vowels [e] - [ε], and the mid high and low back vowels [o] - [ɔ]. The test is conducted online and includes 30 trials distributed in three types of tasks: image identification (8 trials), vowel identification (4) and word discrimination (18). It also contains a short sociolinguistic questionnaire. Our findings indicate that native Russian speakers do not differentiate the Brazilian Portuguese mid vowels very well: the mean percentage of the correct answers in the Russophone group was 68%, while in the French group it was 87% and in the Brazilian control group 99%. No correlation was found between the percentage of correct answers and residence time in Brazil or type of language instruction. As next steps, we plan to investigate the differentiation of the Brazilian Portuguese open and close mid vowels by Russophones at the level of production. We also intend to create a training corpus and develop strategies for perception training of the Brazilian Portuguese mid vowels, monitoring their efficiency at different time points.

The study aims to reveal, based on the linguistic consciousness of native Russian speakers, the degree of awareness of the secondary verb prefix ДО- (DO-) as a functional and semantic component of a multi-prefix verb. The article presents the results of a comprehensive experimental study analyzing the use of polyprefixal verbs with the secondary prefix ДО- in contexts, modeling the associative fields of the studied verbs, describing the range of specific meanings of the prefix ДО-, and identifying the factors influencing the degree to which Russian speakers are aware of the morpheme ДО-. The scientific novelty of the proposed work lies in the fact that, for the first time, the real psychological meaning of the verb prefix ДО- in the linguistic consciousness of a modern native Russian speaker has been revealed experimentally. The experiments established that the secondary prefix ДО- is consistently perceived by native Russian speakers as an expression of the completion of an action. The experimentally identified components of the psychologically real meaning of the prefix are closely interrelated and form a compact core of semantic content associated with ДО-: a finitive meaning (“action brought to an end, to the necessary norm”), including a final meaning (“to complete the final phase of an action (possibly after a temporary break), reaching its limit”) and a final-additional meaning (“an additional action performed to bring the main action to an end”). At the same time, the degree of semantic awareness of the prefix ДО- depends on the intra-word and extra-word contexts.

In the last decade Israel has witnessed the immigration of close to one million native Russian speakers. One of the implications of this influx of newcomers, in a country already dedicated to the absorption of people from many different ethnolinguistic backgrounds, is that issues related to language and identity are receiving renewed attention. This new wave of immigrants has added large numbers of students to Israel's six universities, thus giving new impetus to the role of identity in language achievement. The present paper discusses a study that investigated the relationship among identity, affective variables and achievement in English as a foreign language. Participants in the study were 135 native Hebrew speakers and 53 native Russian speakers studying English as a foreign language at the advanced level at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Variables included ethnolinguistic identity, self-confidence, instrumental and integrative orientation and emotional distance. Achievement measures consisted of teacher evaluations, final examination grades, reading comprehension passages, written expression and a cloze passage. Results showed that ethnolinguistic identity was a greater predictor of achievement than any of the other variables.

The content of this article explores a social dreaming matrix (SDM) and art-making workshop among art therapy trainees in South Africa. This article is a preliminary investigation into the social unconscious of art therapy trainees, as art therapy practitioners and allied practitioners, who need to promote thinking that derives from an intersectional framework, as practising from this framework may help practitioners to be empathetic, culturally attuned, and culturally sensitive within a multicultural context. In this article, I argue that analytic group-based practices or interventions, such as an SDM, are a worthwhile method of getting to know and actively engage in the critical discourse around the lived experiences of students, practitioners, and citizens of South Africa. It may also prove a worthwhile directive for clients wishing to explore their social unconscious. This study considers knowledge and issues surrounding the complexities, contradictions, and discomfort of the lived experiences of future art therapists in South Africa. This exploratory approach aims to facilitate new insights into art therapy trainees’ social unconscious related to their identities as art therapy trainees and future practising art therapists. The central conclusion of the findings reveals that art therapy trainees’ social unconscious comprises five elements: power, privilege, identity, alienation, and violence related to their roles as art therapists. Moreover, the SDM and art-making offer a tool to empower the pedagogical process for art therapy trainees.

The article analyses the results of two associative experiments: the native Russian speakers’ response to the stimulus word “патриот” and the native Chinese speakers’ response to the stimulus word “àiguózhě” (patriot). The authors compare the means of linguistic representation of PATRIOT concept in the consciousness of the Russian and Chinese native speakers by means of modelling the associative fields of concepts ПАТРИОТ and ÀIGUÓZHĚ. The study is based on chain associative experiment data. The analysis of linguistic material has allowed identifying meaningful semantic components of concepts ПАТРИОТ and ÀIGUÓZHĚ and revealing similarities and differences in the concept verbalization in the Russian and Chinese national worldviews.

This is a collaborative inquiry into how dream sharing might inform our work as action researchers. Our main inquiry’s purpose was to explore participants’ experiences of an action research conference through sharing dream material in a social dreaming matrix, set up to create collective rather than individual meanings from dreams. A further purpose, which developed as we reported on the social dreaming matrix, was to examine our own dream insights as an ongoing parallel process whereby we shared our own dreams to facilitate and inform our reporting. We did this through documentary exchange and monthly telephone interchanges. Our theorizing about the interplay between conscious and unconscious mental processes draws on the psychoanalytically based ideas of Bion, Jung, Bollas, and Gordon Lawrence who developed the ideas and practice of social dreaming. We found our dream sharing helped overcome difficulties in writing the paper through a deeper and different level of knowing. Four themes emerged, they were the challenges and risks of doing action research particularly on dreaming, new insights and challenges that our dream sharing raised, the search for guides in our life and work, and the irruption of our research in other aspects of our lives.

Mental Number Line and Simple Addition Task: Experimental Study with Native Russian Speakers