Lecture
THE ROLE OF THE EXPERIMENT IN PSYCHOLINGVISTICS
The question of the need for an experiment in the science of language was first posed by L. V. Shcherba, who believed that "it is possible to derive a language system, i.e., vocabulary and grammar, from" appropriate texts, i.e., from corresponding language material. " But, in his opinion, it is absolutely clear that no other method exists and can not exist in application to dead languages.
"Most linguists usually speak living languages as well," wrote L.V. Scherba, "but also as well as dead ones, i.e. accumulates linguistic material, in other words, writes texts, and then processes them according to the principles of the dead languages ". Scherba believed, "that this produces dead dictionaries and grammars." In his opinion, “the researcher of living languages should act differently”: “The researcher,” he wrote, “should also come from language material that was understood in one way or another. But having built some abstract system from the facts of this material, it is necessary to check it with new facts i.e., to see whether facts derived from it correspond to reality. Thus, the principle of experiment is introduced into linguistics. "
Scherba notes that there can be both a positive result of the experiment and a negative result. Negative results indicate either the incorrectness of the postulated rule, or the need for some of its limitations, or the fact that the rule is no longer there, but only the facts of the dictionary, etc. "
Supporters of traditional linguistic analysis methods have a number of objections to the experiment. 1. The materials of the experiments are very interesting, but what can the subjects say on the instructions of the experimenter? How to prove that the experiment reveals the actual language rules? 2. In the experiment, deliberately artificial situations are created, which is not characteristic of the normal natural functioning of language and speech. 3. In spontaneous speech, sometimes it appears that no experiment can be organized; the possibilities of experimental techniques are rather limited.
An associative experiment is the most developed technique of psycholinguistic analysis of semantics. The procedure is as follows. Subjects are presented with a list of words and are told that they need to be answered with the first words that come to their heads. Each subject is given 100 words and 7-10 minutes for answers. There are varieties of associative experiment:
1. Free. Subjects are not limited to reactions. 2. Directed. The subject is invited to give associations of a certain grammatical and semantic class (for example, an adjective to a noun). 3. Chained. The subjects are asked to respond to the stimulus with several associations — for example, give 10 reactions within 20 seconds.
The following dictionaries of associative norms are widely known: J.Deese. Thought. Baltimore, 1965; "Dictionary of the associative norms of the Russian language" ed. A.A. Leontyev, M., 1977; "Russian associative dictionary" (Moscow, 1994-1999), where 12,600 different words were recorded as answers, and more than a million in total.
The structure of the dictionary entry in this dictionary is as follows: first, the headword is given, then the reactions are arranged in decreasing order of frequency (indicated by a number). Inside the groups they follow in alphabetical order: FOREST ... field, trees 11, autumn, large, birch 7 . 549 + 186 + 0 + 119. The first number at the end of the article indicates the total number of reactions to stimuli, the second - the number of different reactions, the third - the number of subjects who left the stimulus unanswered, i.e. the number of failures. The fourth is the number of single answers, that is, the answers that were given only once and the frequency of which is equal to one.
Syntagmatic associations are associations whose grammatical class is different from the grammatical class of the word stimulus (the sky is blue, the car drives, and smoking is bad ). Paradigmatic associations are words-reactions of the same grammatical class as the words-stimuli ( table - chair, father - mother ). It is believed that paradigmatic associations reflect linguistic relations, and syntagmatic - speech. Genus-species relations ( animal — cat, table — furniture ), reactions that have phonetic similarity with stimulus ( guest — bone ), cliché ( master — golden hands, guest — stone ) and personal ( man — I have to ) are also distinguished .
AE is widely known, is actively used in psycholinguistics, psychology, sociology, psychiatry. On the basis of their data associations, you can build a table of the frequency distribution of the word-reactions to each word-stimulus. A measure of semantic proximity (distance) of a pair of words is the degree of coincidence of the distribution of answers, i.e. the degree of similarity of the objects of analysis is established through the similarity of the data on their associations ("intersection coefficient", "association coefficient", "measure of overlap").
AE makes it possible to build the semantic structure of the word and serves as a valuable material for studying the psychological equivalents of semantic fields and reveals the semantic links of words that objectively exist in the mind of a native speaker. So, in the word exam in the minds of native speakers there is such a psychological moment of the word as “difficult”, “fear”, “scary”, “difficult”. But in the linguistic dictionaries it is absent: Exam (626 people): difficult 87, take 48, pass 35, session 26, test 21, ticket 18, soon 17, in mathematics 13, certificate of maturity, fear 10, scary 8 .. . heavy 6.
By the nature of the associations, it is possible to restore the semantic composition of the stimulus word, since the set of associations given to the word contains a number of signs similar to those contained in the word-stimulus: summer 11; summer 10; rest 6; short, soon, hurray 4; idleness, in Prostokvashino, began school 3.
Such reactions as the mother frame can also be interpreted as phonetic. They are most often given to the subjects in a state of fatigue (for example, at the end of a long experiment) or mentally retarded subjects.
Most of the associations are due to speech stamps, clichés. At the same time, the associations also reflect various aspects of the test's native culture ( area - Red ) and textual reminiscences ( master - Margarita ). Recently, as a result of standard education, the spread of television and other media, stereotypical reactions have increased.
In the methodology of free associations of Kent-Rozanov (Kent-Rozanoff), a set of 100 words is used as an irritant. Speech reactions to these words are standardized on a large number of mentally healthy people and the proportion of non-standard speech reactions is determined. These data allow us to determine the degree of eccentricity, unusual thinking of specific subjects.
Each person has an associative field both in terms of the composition of the names and the strength of the connections between them. Actualization of one or another connection in the response is not accidental and may even depend on the situation ( friend — Mishka ). Both the age, geographical conditions, and the profession of a person have an impact on the nature of associations: a resident of Yaroslavl answered a stimulus brush : rowan , and a grape inhabitant of Dushanbe, the conductor answered: smooth and soft , nurse — amputation , and builder — hair . There are also cultural differences: the most frequent associations — nouns to stimulus — bread for Russians — salt for Uzbeks — tea , and for the French, wine .
One of the very common psycholinguistic methods at one time was the method of additions (cloze procedure). The experiment procedure is as follows. In the text, every fifth, sixth, nth word is omitted. Each missing word is replaced with a space (space) of the same length. The subjects are asked to restore the text, i.e. insert missing words.
(8) Indian ............ put on ............ took ........... sat in ....... ... and went to ..........
The essence of the restoration technique is the distortion of the voice message and its subsequent presentation to the subjects for recovery. A prerequisite for the possibility of restoring a destroyed message is the principle of redundant voice message, which provides even if there is interference, a more or less adequate understanding of both oral and written speech. This technique appeared because the use of technical means of communication entailed the omission of letters or their replacement by others.
The subjects with greater ease restore the text, damaged in its "easy" form (when articles, conjunctions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs are omitted) than in its difficult form (when nouns, verbs and adverbs are omitted). If the recipient speaks the sender's language, it is easy for him to understand the message and fill in the blanks. If filling in the gaps is difficult for him, then it will be difficult for him to understand this message. Unpredictable words are more successfully and more quickly restored by older people rather than younger subjects. Noisy words without context restore young subjects more successfully, and older subjects more successfully restore noisy words based on an understanding of the context.
Persons who, in a free associative experiment, give a large number of rare associations, less correctly restore a damaged text. At the same time, the texts written by these subjects indicate an increased anxiety of these persons. Experimental data according to the method of addition allows to draw conclusions not only with respect to texts, but also to describe the features of speech and non-speech behavior of the subjects.
In psycholinguistics, subjects may be asked to comment on the truth or falsity of some judgment or on whether the presented character set is a word (lexicaldecision task). Proposals are presented to the subject and time is elapsed between the presentation of a judgment (say on a computer monitor) and the answer signaling the completion of the process of understanding (after pressing a key). So that the subject doesn’t imitate understanding, semantic questions about the presented material are periodically asked.
Experiments show that the semantic distance between objects depends on the levels of semantic organization to which they belong. So, for example, making a judgment regarding the truth of the statement of the Canary - a bird takes less time than about the approval of a Canary - an animal , since verification of the latter requires an intermediate step in ascertaining that canaries, entering the category of birds, belong to the class of animals. The semantic distance of objects of different levels of generality is determined both by the plan of their content and by the plan of their generalization.
Measuring the degree of semantic closeness of words in human consciousness according to the method proposed by A.R. Luria and O.S. Vinogradova is associated with the peculiarities of human vascular reflexes. When a neutral reaction to an external stimulus is stimulated, the blood vessels of the fingers and head are in a normal state and show no changes. With an orienting reaction, when a person actively reacts to some kind of stimulus, the vessels of the fingers contract, while the vessels of the head expand. During a protective reaction, when a person reacts to an unfavorable stimulus, he mobilizes the forces of his body to resist, the vessels and fingers, and the heads are compressed.
In the experiment, the person called the word violin and at the same time struck a gentle blow of current. A protective reaction was developed on the impact of the current, which persisted even when the subject heard the word violin , and there was no electric shock. A person was called a number of other words; he reacted to each of them differently. So, he reacted to the words violinist, bow, string, mandolin, double bass with a defensive reaction, i.e. just like the word violin . Approximate (ie, weaker reactions were noted in the subjects when they were presented with the names of non-stringed musical instruments ( drum, accordion, clarinet ), names associated with musical compositions and their performance, i.e. music in general ( sonata, concerto) ), the words that are only phonetically close to the word violin ( clip ). On the third group of words ( cabinet, boot, cloud ) the reactions were neutral. This principle underlies the lie detector (lie detector).
During the experiment on gradual scaling, the subjects are asked to arrange a series of words of one semantic group “in order”. For example, 36 words with the value "size" were located 103 subjects in the experiment as follows: Microscopic, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, dwarf, puppet, miniature, toy, small, small, small, small, normal size, rather big, big, big, decent sizes, large, significant sizes, solid sizes, healthy, bulky, impressive sizes, huge, huge, huge, gigantic, grandiose, not comprehensive, gigantic, immeasurable, enormous, klopichesky, monstrous size.
Accordingly, if the place of a word is known on a certain semantic scale, the semantic distance between the words can be measured: Small - rather big (distance 2.81); small - large (5.14); tiny - huge (23.80); microscopic - monstrous size (33,17).
The results of this experiment allow you to create "gradual dictionaries" of practical value (in particular, for the preparation of advertising texts).
Close to the objectives of the study on the method of vascular reactions and methods associated with the construction of various kinds of classifications. The results of these experiments show cognitive processes - how a person selects features, summarizes them, forming certain groups, classes.
At the end of the 1960s, J. Miller put forward the hypothesis that the material classification forms correspond to the internal semantic links of this material and, therefore, the structure of these links can be expressed in the classification procedure itself. The subjects are asked to classify the material (for example, several words), and neither the number of groups that the subject can form or the number of words in each group is limited. The results of the experiment are reflected in the matrix, where the measure of the semantic similarity of each pair of objects is the number of assignments of their subjects to one class. On the basis of such changes, a procedure of the so-called cluster analysis is carried out, i.e. combining objects into sequential groups. First, the words that are semantically closest to each other are combined, then these pairs are again united - with those pairs that are closer to them, etc. Rows of clusters appear, organizing the material at different levels of semantic proximity. The result is a kind of clustering tree. The closer the similarity of words, the shorter the branches of the tree connecting these words. Here is a fragment of the classification tree:
suitcase ----------------
box --------------------
closet --------------------------
chest -------------------------
the cellar -------------------------------------
machine -----------------------
movement ---------------------
aircraft -------------------------------
sailboat --------------------------------------------
stretcher ------------------------------------------------- ------
With a large number of subjects and a large set of words, cluster analysis allows us to discover facts that help to additionally reveal important semantic patterns.
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Psycholinguistics
Terms: Psycholinguistics