Psycho- and Sociolinguistic Tools for Reconstruction of Inference / Association Mechanism as Individual Cognitive Ability

Abstract

The present paper justifies the need to elaborate new methodology in psycholinguistics for the disclosure of such a complex cognitive mechanism of producing senses as an inference based primarily on various human associations. It was assumed that the tools of the empirical method of observation are the most appropriate for the reconstruction of this mechanism. It consists in obtaining data with the help of sensory organs, which are involved in the display of relations between things, objects, phenomena, processes and states both of the surrounding world and the inner subjective state of man. Therefore, the process of empirical study of reality is considered in detail, which provides for three main procedures: 1) actualization of the observed phenomenon, 2) its reflection in the form of scientific hypotheses, and 3) fixation of the obtained facts as the results of the study. Since the reflection process is the most significant, the article provides a critical review of the experimental methods and techniques for its analysis developed in psycholinguistics and partly in sociolinguistics tested in numerous cognitive-oriented works. It is proved that the most relevant results have been obtained by psycholinguists during the experimental study of reflected in native speakers’ consciousness the association meaning of the word as an ordered set of all semantic components: more or less expressive, nuclear and peripheral things etc. The main of these experimental methods of observation (direct and indirect) were the following: free association experiment and targeted association experiment, during which the following methods were developed and applied: Osgood method of semantic differential, Levitsky method of multidimensional scaling, Sternin and Sternina comparative and parametric, Bendix method. As a result of numerous psycholinguistic studies, the experimenters pointed to the advantages (mostly) and disadvantages of the methods, which require further improvement of the developed experimental procedures.