Psycholinguistic Methods Research Articles

RESEARCH METHODS OF SEMANTIC STRUCTURE IN THE ORAL SPONTANEOUS TEXT

In the article are reviewed research methods of the semantic structure in the spontaneous oral text. The semantic structure of the text is defined. Emphasis is placed on the choice of research method for the semantic structure in the text. Since the semantic structure of the text is the cognitive projection of the text in the human mind, therefore, its study must be based on psycholinguistic methods that allow use of the linguistic consciousness. However, when a large number of texts are investigated, for it is required large number of informants and it is very labor-intensive. Therefore, to continue a productive research of the semantic structure in the text, it is necessary to find a method that allows modeling of the semantic structure of texts without involvement of informants and adequately to their linguistic consciousness. That is why, are considered psycholinguistic method for research of the text integrity (method of topic allocation), method of graphosemantic modeling (basic method) and the method developed by the author of graphosemantic modeling considering syntactic relations (modification of basic methods). Analysis results acquired by processing the same text with these methods are compared. It is shown that the modified technique correlates with data acquired by psycholinguistic methods.

Image of Guest in the Russian and Japanese Linguocultures

Through the analysis of the association reactions of Russian and Japanese native speakers, the intensity of hospitality in the Russian and Japanese linguocultures is examined in the article. There are considered similarities and differences of perceiving the image of guest by the Russians and Japanese. The article demonstrates that the content of the semanteme “Guest” is not identical in the Russian and Japanese languages. In the conditions of active contacts between representatives of different cultures in our supersonic age, the comparative research of linguistic consciousness is an important contribution to the development of mutual understanding between representatives of different linguocultures, Russian and Japanese in this case. The dynamics of change of the image of guest in the Russian linguoculture is of great interest. It has been experiencing noticeable perturbations throughout the recent decades. The application of psycholinguistic methods to achieve the mentioned aims is an uncommon and quite new phenomenon for comparing the Russian and Japanese linguocultures. The research has shown that in the Japanese linguoculture it is mainly women who extend hospitality, which refl ects the traditional patriarchal practice of the Japanese society. Another conclusion is that the present-day Russians, who do not display any difference regarding the image of guest according to their gender factor, have become less hospitable as compared to the beginning of 1990s.

Psycholinguistic methods for evaluation of educational vocabulary internalization

Psycholinguistic methods for evaluation of educational vocabulary internalization

Психолингвистическая трактовка коннотативного аспекта значения слова

The problem under consideration in the article regards the interrelation between
 the concept of connotation if we speak in terms of traditional linguistics
 and the so called personal meaning – a term which is referred to
 the conceptual framework of psycholinguistics. Though a special stress is
 made on the fact that while comparing both concepts, there is a lot in common
 between them in their interpretation and understanding. Connotation
 is understood as a personal judgement of the meaning containing a special
 evaluative part. The emotional impression of a word generates a certain
 perception of it by an individual. The emotional effect from the perception of
 an object is embodied in the meaning as a personal attitude to it. Personal
 meaning is considered to be a personal attitude of an individual to a real
 thing and this very personal emotionally coloured attitude assigns a specific
 meaning to the thing. Any general word meaning adopted by an individual
 undergoing the influence of his or her system of values, prescriptions and
 interests acquires that very personal meaning which determines the attitude
 of an individual to reality. The essence of the fundamental psychological
 theory of word meaning created by A.N.Leontiev is revealed. Leontiev understood
 human conscience as a certain system consisting of the following
 parts: meaning, personal meaning and sensitive substance. The meaning
 is perceived as an integrated reflection of reality and personal meaning defines
 and shows the attitude of an individual to reality. Personal meaning
 is manifested itself in the emotional marking and evaluating of this or that
 object. An attempt is made to prove, that connotation and personal meaning
 are different terms for one and the same concept which is known as the
 emotional evaluation of a real thing produced by human conscience. In the
 course of the latter process an additional gradation to the meaning of a word
 is introduced. One of the basic methods of psycholinguistics is described
 – that of the method of semantic differential which gives an opportunity to
 measure the connotative aspect of a word meaning.

Die Repräsentation von Fachsprache im mentalen Lexikon. Empirische Ergebnisse zur Wortassoziation

The main purpose of the paper is to show how the psycholinguistic method of word association analysis can provide new insights into the mental representation of languages forspecific purposes. Languages for specific purposes and their use have been thoroughly analysed in the past decades. Despite the extensive research carried out in the field, just a few papers analyse the cognitive representation of these languages. The present paper shows that some characteristics of the cognitive representation of these languages can be obtained on the basis of word association tests. Tests have been carried out in Hungarian for two languages for specific purposes: Economy and Sports. In the investigation of the language of Economy we collected associations with a research webpage specially created for collecting word association data from internet users. The associations of 593 subjects are analysed for 19 stimuli. For the language of Sports 100 people gave associations to 100 stimuli, of which 20 are examined in the paper. The analyses of the associations show that the cognitive organization depends not only on education level in a specialised field: it seems that (at least up to a certain level) age also plays an important role in the cognitive organization structure of specialised languages. The final part of the paper shows how a better understanding of the cognitive representation of languages for specific purposes can help to improve selected aspects of specialised communication.

Understanding multilingualism and its implications.

The world's demographics are in a state of flux. Approximately half of the world's population is bilingual (Grosjean, 2010). Just over half of all Europeans speak a language other than the official language in a given country, and 25% of them report that they are able to hold a conversation in at least two additional languages (European Commission, 2012, p. 18). Bi- and multilingualism are also the reality in North America. Grosjean (2012) estimates that 20% of Americans are bilingual. In 2011, over 20% of Canadians reported speaking a mother tongue other than English or French, and the number of Canadians who report being bilingual is rising rapidly (Statistics Canada, 2012). While the causes of increased bi- and multilingualism vary, the repercussions of this demographic shift are wide reaching. In August 2013 the Language Research Centre at the University of Calgary brought together a range of experts working on issues related to the acquisition of multiple languages to consider the implications of multilingualism in our society. Discussions at the conference entitled “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Multilingualism” were focused around three key areas: language acquisition, psycholinguistic research methods, and second language pedagogy and literacy development. These broad fields are represented in this issue of Frontiers.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIAL ADVERTISEMENT ON THE LINGUISTIC CONSCIENCE OF CITIZENS OF MULTICULTURAL CITY

Aim: to reveal how and with the help of what methods and techniques the social advertisement changes the social conscience of the citizens of Kostanai city. Methods or methodology of the study: method of conceptual analysis aimed at the displaying and matter of axiological concepts; method of sociological survey; psycholinguistic method of free association experiment. Results. The phenomenon of social advertisement is studied in an anthropocentric aspect; the ways and techniques of attracting attention used by social advertisement are studied; linguistic means of conscience manipulating are analyzed; the use of psycholinguistic method of free association experiment gives the possibility to prove the undoubted influence of social advertisement directed at changing of linguistic conscience of recipients. The area of results application. The results of estimation of social advertisement influence on recipient linguistic conscience could be relevant for advertising experts when composing social advertisement texts and carrying out PR-actions focused on the attracting attention to modern worthwhile problems.

Reading Dickens's characters: Employing psycholinguistic methods to investigate the cognitive reality of patterns in texts.

This article reports the findings of an empirical study that uses eye-tracking and follow-up interviews as methods to investigate how participants read body language clusters in novels by Charles Dickens. The study builds on previous corpus stylistic work that has identified patterns of body language presentation as techniques of characterisation in Dickens (Mahlberg, 2013). The article focuses on the reading of ‘clusters’, that is, repeated sequences of words. It is set in a research context that brings together observations from both corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics on the processing of repeated patterns. The results show that the body language clusters are read significantly faster than the overall sample extracts which suggests that the clusters are stored as units in the brain. This finding is complemented by the results of the follow-up questions which indicate that readers do not seem to refer to the clusters when talking about character information, although they are able to refer to clusters when biased prompts are used to elicit information. Beyond the specific results of the study, this article makes a contribution to the development of complementary methods in literary stylistics and it points to directions for further subclassifications of clusters that could not be achieved on the basis of corpus data alone.

Phantom readings: the case of modified numerals

We investigate the mechanisms proposed in formal semantics to account for the ambiguity generated by simple numerical expressions (e.g., ‘three students’). We explain how these mechanisms, when applied to more complex numerical expressions such as ‘between n and m’ (e.g., ‘between three and five students’), predict a surprising ambiguity between a doubly bounded (e.g., ‘at least three and at most five students’) and a lower-bounded reading (e.g., ‘at least three students’). While the lower-bounded reading is not detectable intuitively, results from three offline experiments and a response time study provide evidence in favour of its existence. Our contribution is twofold. On the experimental side, we present two psycholinguistic methods powerful enough to detect what we call phantom readings, i.e., readings that do not seem to have consequences for actual interpretation, but have detectable effects on processing. On the theoretical side, we show that certain semantic mechanisms that might be thought to overgenerate are in fact vindicated, since they are able to predict certain processing facts that would otherwise remain mysterious. We discuss how these results illustrate the need for a strong integration of formal semantics and psycholinguistic approaches.

The impacts of new CEOs' psychological factors on post-succession strategic change

We use the psycholinguistic content analysis methods to investigate how new CEOs' psychological factors influence the post succession strategic changes (PSSC) of firms in the FTSE all share index. Taking the trilogy of mind perspective, on top of cognition, we advocate that new CEOs' emotion and conation serve as the impetus for the PSSC. By tracing the identical new CEOs over years after their succession in a non-experimental field study, empirical results of this longitudinal study demonstrate that those intra-individual psychological (time-varying) factors of new CEOs are important for the PSSC. New CEOs' future focus attention (FFA), commitment to change (C2C) will significantly increase the PSSC and new CEOs' negative emotion (NE) will significantly reduce the PSSC. The paper claims that incorporating more comprehensive factors in new CEOs' trilogy of mind can help us get a better picture for the mechanism behind PSSC.

The power of words: CEOs' psychological factors and CEO turnover types

We use the psycholinguistic analysis methods to investigate how CEOs' psychological factors influence their types of departure i.e. voluntary and involuntary CEO turnovers in the FTSE all share ind...

Метод психолингвистики в социологическом исследовании

The article speaks about implementation of a psycho linguistic method in the ethno sociological research. The main position of the author is based on the theoretical assumption that native language as a primary field of functioning of the ethnic culture and proves it by the researches that were conducted under the supervision of the author during the period of 1995—2013 in the laboratory of ethnic sociology and psychology of the faculty of sociology of the SPbSU by the quota sample of Saint-Petersburg population. In particular the article describes methods based on the usage of Russian phraseological units / idiomatic expressions and folk proverbs that bring to light the general direction of the value system, social orientations in the sphere of political, ethnic and gender relations, as well as political, ethnic and gender stereotypes. From the author’s point of view, preferableness of the psycho linguistic method is determined by the latency of “right” or “wrong” answer that let us find out a latent social reflection. This assumption is based on the control of veracity of the results made by the means of other methods and procedures. The article is accompanied by the references on the sources in which it is possible to learn more about the research results made by the means of psycho linguistic method.

Lexical-semantic representation in bilingual aphasia: Findings from semantic priming and cognate repetition priming

Background: While many studies have investigated the nature of language organisation in monolingual speakers with aphasia, our understanding of bilingual aphasia lags far behind. Only a handful of studies have employed on-line psycholinguistic experimental methods to explore the nature of language representation and processing in bilingual speakers with aphasia. Improving our understanding of how language is organised and processed in bilingual speakers with aphasia is central to the development of effective impairment-level language treatments. Cognate/noncognate representation and semantic representation are two key aspects of bilingual language organisation that are yet to be explored in depth in bilingual speakers with aphasia.Aims: The present study aimed to investigate (1) whether semantic representation was shared across the two languages of a bilingual speaker with aphasia and (2) whether cognate words would produce a processing advantage relative to noncognate words (as has been found in neurologically-normal younger bilingual adults).Methods & Procedures: A 70-year-old bilingual Italian/English speaker, who presented with nonfluent aphasia and apraxia of speech, completed two priming experiments: a semantic priming experiment and a cognate repetition priming experiment.Outcomes & Results: In the semantic priming experiment, the participant demonstrated large priming effects in both within-language conditions and one cross-language condition. The finding of priming in at least one of the cross-language conditions provides some corroboration for shared semantic representation in this bilingual individual with aphasia. In the cognate repetition priming experiment, the participant produced a language-specific cognate advantage in English, for words repeated in the same language. For words repeated in a different language condition (i.e., as their translation equivalent), the participant produced a processing advantage for noncognate words.Conclusions: The findings of this study provided support for shared semantic representation in bilingual speakers following aphasia; however, the results also suggested that aphasia can disrupt normal lexical access processes. Results in relation to cognate versus noncognate processing suggested that bilingual speakers with aphasia may not, necessarily, always display a cognate advantage. Overall, the present study showed that language processing in bilingual speakers with aphasia is highly complex and is dependent upon the intricate interplay between the speaker’s premorbid language proficiency, inhibitory processing deficits that occur with normal aging and postmorbid language impairment and recovery patterns.

PSYCHOLINGUISTIC APPROACH TO FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING

The study of verbal behavior in a foreign language with the complex of methods of different sciences is the up-to-date task of scientific knowledge. The study of the ability to learn foreign languages is conducted with the help of psycholinguistic methods on the basis of contracted forms of communication, considering individual characteristics of speakers as well as level of their language culture, semantics and elements of their speech. The carried empirical study allows to say that there is the dependence of individual characteristics, motivation of communication, communicative skills of participants of communication and presence of various semantic and syntactic types of contracted forms in the dialogue. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12731/2218-7405-2013-8-26

Sources of variability relevant to the cognitive sociolinguist, and corpus- as well as psycholinguistic methods and notions to handle them

This paper is a plea for sociolinguistics to integrate both theoretical and methodological developments from cognitive linguistics and, even more importantly, psycholinguistics. More specifically, I argue that theoretical advances involving exemplar-based models and new methodological tools from psycholinguistics (regressions, in particular mixed-effects models) and corpus linguistics (in particular, more bottom-up studies) would help further sociolinguistics to a considerable degree. To exemplify at least some ways what such developments would look like, I then discuss three small case studies of instances of constructional variation in usage/corpus data, which showcase how contextual as well as cognitive-/psycholinguistic language-internal and sociolinguistic language-external factors interact and can be explored.

Language in Schizophrenia Part 1: An Introduction

This is the first of two articles that discuss higher-order language and semantic processing in schizophrenia. This article reviews clinical characterizations of language output and the phenomenon of positive thought disorder, as well as more principled characterizations of language output in schizophrenia. It also gives an overview of evidence for the predominant theory of language dysfunction in schizophrenia: that it arises from abnormalities in (a) semantic memory and/or (b) working memory and executive function. The companion article (Part 2) focuses on the study of language in schizophrenia using online psycholinguistic methods and considers how the study of schizophrenia may inform our understanding of normal language processing.

Combining corpus linguistic and psychological data on word co-occurrences: Corpus collocates versus word associations

It is desirable to combine corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic methods and data types to illuminate the phenomenon of word co-occurrence. However, it is not only the cases where parallels between corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic findings are found that prove significant. In this study, it is shown that there are fewer parallels, and far more differences, between corpus collocations and word association responses than has been previously assumed. For instance, word association responses are typically semantically related to the stimulus word and belong to the lexical word classes, neither of which is typically true of collocates of the same node word in a corpus. The conclusion drawn is therefore that the word association task does not reflect authentic language production, but should rather be seen as tapping into the semantic information of the mental lexicon only.

Unconscious linguistic referents to race: analysis and methodological frameworks

Recent years have seen considerable development in methodological designs for accessing and eliciting unconscious cognitive schemata in response to social stimuli, including race. One design is experimental and involves the priming and automatic activation of schemata. Another design is a specifically developed psycho-linguistic and logico-mathematic method for recognizing, analyzing, and validating unconsciously expressed meaning in verbal narratives, referred to as sub-literal (SubLit). Unconscious references to race found in verbal discourse from both laboratory and everyday settings, including the mass media, are illustrated and analyzed utilizing these two complementary methodological designs. Along with suggested procedures, an initial classification scheme for attributions of racial stereotypes and prejudice are presented. Given the historical and current state of race relations both nationally and globally, the paper has significant social implications.

Profiles and Perspectives: “On the Psycholinguistic Method of Teaching Reading” Revisited

Ken Goodman and Frank Smith met for the first time in 1970, though they had each been studying and writing, separately, about the reading process for several years prior to that. They commemorated the occasion by collaborating on an article, On the Psycholinguistic Method of Teaching Reading which appeared soon after in The Elementary School Journal.

Getting a Grip on Metaphor: It Has a Hold on Us But Can We Embrace it?

The intuitive appeal of a metaphor to describe and explain a negotiator's point of view has become more popular but requires better theoretical and empirical grounding than seen so far. This study adapts psycholinguistic and lexicographic methods to take a different look at negotiation from the perspective of conceptual metaphor. As predicted by interdisciplinary research, certain metaphors and combinations are found widely used in diverse negotiation dialogs, negotiators are only minimally conscious of them, and capitalize on them infrequently. The structural attributes of metaphors found in this analysis correspond to those found in a body of research on conceptual metaphor concerned with the intersection of thought, talk, and action. From a research standpoint these findings, coupled with this demonstrated methodology, offer to help put metaphor study in conflict resolution on a more sound footing. From the point of view of practice improved understanding of opposing positions, additional avenues to mutual gain, and several negotiator training suggestions are discussed.