Psycholinguistics as a scientific discipline

Schooling a native or foreign language is quite often boring, and since everyone knows that science called linguistics is studying languages, it seems to some that linguistics is a vague description of the systems of inclination and conjugation in different languages; this impression is too superficial and wrong on the merits. It looks like two drops of water on opinions like that “botany studies pistils and stamens,” zoology “describes bugs and cockroaches,” medicine — “guts and vertebrae,” etc. With such notions, it is better for man and not to do science at all .

We address our book to those who understand the importance and complexity of scientific knowledge and consciously decided to join such knowledge; Moreover, there are few such scientific objects that can be compared with human languages ​​and with the process of their functioning in society - with speech activity. The science that studies and describes the characteristics of the production, understanding, functioning and development of speech is called psycholinguistics. Of course, the question may arise why linguistics itself (that is, the science of language) does not deal with the process of speech, if speech is really “language in action”? It is easiest to say that in the very name of “psycholinguistics” the second part is “linguistics”. Consequently, psycholinguistics is part of linguistics. However, it must be admitted that not all linguists have fully recognized her as “their own”. Why? Because, first of all, linguistics, science is quite “elderly”, has long had its own traditions, the main of which is to maintain loyalty to its traditional object of study, the language as such, language as a system. It must be admitted that this traditional object of traditional linguistics is far from being fully described. It is clear that to describe human language in its several thousand national and regional varieties is a difficult and long work. This honorable and necessary work will, of course, continue in the future, especially since all languages ​​need not only be described, but compared with each other, penetrated into their history, explained the infinite variety of their constituent means, their development and mixing, helping

thus, together with the history of the culture of the world, to understand how humanity developed and develops.

Secondly, linguists themselves are not without self-criticism, believing that in addition to objects traditional for traditional linguistics, there are also other objects adjacent to the former and necessary for expanding and deepening linguistics itself. So, back in the early 50s, a remarkable linguist, Emil Benveniste, wrote: “... you cannot confine yourself to material forms, that is, you cannot limit all linguistics to a description of language forms.” And at the beginning of the 80s, a professor at Moscow State University, a well-known linguist A.E. Kibrik, even emotionally expressed his attitude towards the stubborn traditionalism of linguistics: “It’s hard to imagine a more caste science than linguistics. Linguists are constantly dissociating themselves from something. Their favorite way to destroy an ideological adversary is to declare: "This is not linguistics."

In the meantime, psycholinguistics will soon be fifty years old; born, she rapidly developed and developed - despite all sorts of "non-recognition." Moreover, it develops in full conformity (and not contrary to what was stated and claimed by many traditional linguists) with the thought of the famous linguist Ferdinand de Saussure: “You can imagine a science that studies the life of signs within the life of society; such a science would be a part of social psychology, and consequently, of general psychology ... It should reveal to us what signs are (i.e., units of language as a sign system - IG, K.S.) and what laws are they governed by ... Linguistics is only part of this general science; the laws that semiology will open up (as F. de Saussure called science, which was not yet —I. G., C.C.), will also be applicable to linguistics ... ”And again:“ ... for the first time we can find place linguistics among other sciences, it is only because we have connected it with semiology. " And F. de Saussure showed in his writings how, in his opinion, a new linguistic science should be built, choosing only the system of the language itself as the only object of linguistics - until the science that he called “semiology” is formed (“because he wrote - it does not exist yet "). The main thing that I wanted to show here - with the help of quotations from the works of de Saussure himself - is that references to his authority absolutely cannot justify those traditionalists from linguistics,

which require that “their” science be left intact, insulating from psychology or sociology.

However, despite the inertia of the conservatives, in modern linguistics a new, rapidly developing direction appeared, which was called anthropocentric (or anthropological). As is evident from the internal form of the term itself (antropos is human), anthropocentric linguistics places not so much the language (in terms of the laws of its internal structure) as the “person speaking”, i.e. linguistic personality; It is a linguistic personality (that is, a person in his ability to perform speech actions) - has become an integral object of numerous spheres of the science of language, which constituted various areas of anthropocentric linguistics. These include pragma and sociolinguistics, linguistics of children's speech (ontolinguistics) and text linguistics, ethno-linguistics, and many more. others

Psycholinguistics, in our opinion, is the core of the anthropocentric direction in linguistics. Given that the object of study - the linguistic personality - among the different disciplines that have constituted anthropological linguistics, is common, each of the presented young sciences has its own subject of study. The subject of psycholinguistics is the linguistic personality, considered in the individual psychological aspect .

Psychology is much more willing to consider “his” psycholinguistics. True, in psychology there is a long-standing area - the psychology of speech, the object and subject of which exactly coincide with the object and subject of psycholinguistics. And by now there is a tradition of identifying these two disciplines. There is a reason for this identification, but there is still a slight difference in the understanding of these terms. The differences relate mainly to the perspective of the subject of study: psychology focuses more on the features of the mental functions of consciousness in the course of generation, understanding and formation of speech, while psycholinguistics tries to take into account the ways of expression (linguistic and non-verbal) of these functions in speech activities and speech behavior of people.

Psycholinguistics is a pretty young science. In our country and abroad, it originated at about the same time; in the late 50s - early 60s of the 20th century. The book that der

is in the hands of the reader, it is devoted to the presentation of the foundations of the domestic psycholinguistics. To get acquainted with the foreign tradition of the scientific field of interest to us, we refer readers to the special literature, a list of which is given at the end of our manual.

The "father" of the Soviet school of psycholinguistics was Aleksey Alekseevich Leontyev. The scientific direction he created was based mainly on the achievements of domestic psychology, and above all, on conceptual concepts developed by Mozart of Psychology Lev Vygotsky and his students and colleagues (A. R. Luria, A. N. Leont'ev, etc.). The theory of activity then became the basis of psycholinguistics, therefore the domestic version of psycholinguistics at the early stages of its formation was called the theory of speech activity. The theory of speech activity formed the foundation of what is now called the “Vygotsky school”, or the “Moscow school” in psycholinguistics. At first, in the 1960s - 1970s, it almost completely determined the range of problems and theoretical achievements in the study of the individual psychic characteristics of a language personality. The first works of domestic psycholinguists have aroused great interest of scientists living in various parts of our country. The result was a kind of psycholinguistic “boom” that arose in the 1980s. Gradually the scope of psycholinguistics began to move apart; as a result, it has become much wider than the theory of speech activity. Along with Vygotsky’s school, other schools have emerged in Russian psycholinguistics. Among the most reputable research groups are the circle of scientists who developed the ideas of a talented psychologist and psycholinguist Nikolai Ivanovich Zhinkin. The existence of various "schools" in the domestic psycholinguistics did not prevent, but contributed to the expansion of the problems of this science, and the deepening of the results obtained in the course of research.

The current psycholinguistics is developing most intensively in the direction of social psychology and sociolinguistics. Her interests lie in determining the psychological characteristics of the relationship of linguistic consciousness and social activity of a person, social being and the life of linguistic personalities. And here the ground becomes the work of another bright and differential

Mikhail Mikhaylovich Bakhtin, the domestic Russian researcher, who in the 1920s tried to substantiate the so-called “sociological method” in linguistics.

The expansion of scientific space has led psycholinguistics to the emergence in its depths of various areas of independent nature of the problems to be solved. Some of these areas (for example, phonosemantics) have fairly clear scientific boundaries; the outlines of other internal sections (pathopsycholinguistics, linguistic conflictology, etc.) are still indistinct and diffuse.

At present, it is possible to speak about the regularity of the allocation in the whole space of our science of general and particular psycholinguistics.

General psycholinguistics - examines the facts of linguistic consciousness, which are characteristic of all native speakers of a given language, regardless of the characteristics of their speech biography. As an object of consideration, she takes a certain averaged image of an adult healthy (physically and intellectually) language personality, abstracting from the individual physiological and social differences of people.

Private psycholinguistics - study different areas of development, language functioning in speech behavior and activity. To the present period of development of psycholinguistics, as a science, social psycholinguistics and age psycholinguistics (ontolinguistics) have emerged as independent scientific fields.

Social psycholinguistics - in its consideration of the individual psychological characteristics of the linguistic personality places emphasis on the differences in speech behavior, activity, and verbal-cognitive manifestations, which are dictated by the socio-psychological characteristics of people's existence.

Developmental psycholinguistics (ontolinguistics ) has concentrated its efforts on the study of the formation of a linguistic personality in ontogenesis. Sometimes it is also called the psycholinguistics of the Danish language.

Being at the junction of linguistics and psychology, psycholinguistics actively uses the methods of both sciences. Thus, in the course of analyzing specific speech facts, it widely attracts descriptive and comparative descriptive approaches that are common to the science of language. In psychology, psycholinguistics takes ways to “extract

chi ”material for thought. And this, by the way, distinguishes it from traditional "immanent" linguistics.

Traditional linguistics leads to a “desk” study of “linguistic processes. Psycholinguists are interested in phenomena occurring in the "live" everyday communication of people. Therefore, one of the sources for obtaining material for research is the observation of real communication . And here the eye and the ear of the psycholinguist eagerly absorb everything that will leave the study of another scientist indifferent, which is traditionally considered to be "negative language material." This includes the "wrong" conversational constructions, all sorts of reservations and "mistakes", clerks and typos that make native speakers. The interest of the psycholinguist will also be caused by the gentle "cooing" of lovers, and the ugly scandal in the store, and even the indistinct, stranded speech of a drunkard. And the speech of children is just “gold ore” for him.

Observations on real communication allow us to consider language, manifestations within specific communicative situations, which allows the researcher to study not his ideas about the language, but “the living life of the language”. However, many of the problems of the anthropocentric trend in linguistics — above all the problem of the relationship between language and thinking — cannot be resolved based only on observations of speech. This is where psycholinguistics comes to the rescue. It must be said that experiment is the soul of psycholinguistic research . It is on the basis of special, often witty, laboratory experiments with various subjects that the concepts that constitute the theoretical foundation of psycholinguistics are developed. On the pages of our book, we will more than once give a description of the experiments, sometimes inviting readers to check their results on their loved ones.