Social Media in English and Russian Language Consciousness. Article 1. Psycholinguistic experiments

Abstract

Introduction. This research is devoted to the systematic description of a concept «social media» in the Russian and English linguistic consciousness. The article consists of two parts. The first part is dedicated to the research of the concept in a serial psycholinguistic experiment. The second part includes the analysis of the concept’s presence in text corpora and also the field and the classificational cognitive models of the concept. The first part describes nominative fields of the concept «social media» and its subconcepts and provides a cognitive interpretation and a comparative analysis of the data in Russian and English languages.
 Methods of the research. The structure of the concept «social media» is set by the method of subjective definition of the word. The structure of subconcepts (social network, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) is set by the method of free associations. The procedure of cognitive interpretation sets cognitive classifiers of the concept. The significance of the quantitative analysis was diagnosed by the Fisher angular transformation method (criterion φ).
 Results. The non-specific trait of the concept «social media» in Russian and English discourses is the identical classificational cognitive structure. Dissimilarities in the structure are noticeable only in the peripheral zones. The diffusion of the reactions (in various experiments) in the core and peripheral zones shows that the concept «social media» is socially and culturally specific.
 Conclusion. The results can be useful in the development of psycholinguistics 2.0, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics (OCR, ASR, data mining, automatic translation, etc.), lexicography, etc.