Speech perception and understanding

Having considered in the previous section the nature of the formation of statements, we turn to the analysis of the process of perception and understanding of speech. It would seem that decoding the incoming speech information repeats the identified sequence of text generation steps in the reverse order. Highlighting words in a speech flow (or in writing), the listener (reader) “deciphers” their meanings. Owning the grammatical laws, he reveals the correlation of tokens with each other and thus comprehends the content, the meaning of the verbal message.

However, as shown by studies of domestic and foreign scientists, the situation is much more complicated. Of course, lexical and grammatical knowledge in the understanding of statements plays a crucial role. But understanding is not a passive mechanical movement from meaning to meaning. This is a complex holistic psychological process. And it begins with the search for a general thought of a statement, in which anticipation and attitude that arise in the listener's (reader's) language consciousness are of great importance. From the first minutes of communication, the perceiver shows oncoming mental activity aimed at achieving the goal of the speaker, motive and hidden meaning of the message. The decoding process is based on many factors that are not related to the lexical and grammatical structure of the language. It is an initially holistic process, which is influenced by the peculiarities of the social and social situation.

communicative interaction, determining the type of speech genre, knowledge about the addressee, prior to the beginning of communication, and the nature of the status-role relationships between interlocutors (communicative partners), and non-verbal (conscious and unconscious) elements of speech and many others. others

The phenomenon of forecasting in speech activity, we consider separately. We now turn to defining the role of lexical and grammatical elements in the understanding of speech work.

Meaning perception begins with the selection of significant elements of the speech utterance (words). This process is based on a special type of hearing, which only a man has, that is, the phonemic hearing. This hearing is based on the ability to distinguish and identify speech sounds according to their relation to sound patterns - phonemes.

Understanding words is the most elementary statement decoding operation. However, here the addressee of communication faces certain difficulties. To begin with, a specific situation has a significant effect on the comprehension of words in real communication. Let's give an example of a dialogue.

- Black?

- No, red.

Why white?

-Because it is green.

Considered outside of the communication situation, the dialogue may seem absurd. But if we assume that it reflects the conversation of two summer residents near the currant bush, then all the perplexities disappear.

The source of another kind of complexity of semantic perception is that every word in speech manifests such properties as polysemy and homonymy. In other words, depending on the context of use, the same designation may convey unequal content. For example, the word sharp in phrases is a sharp mind and a sharp needle has a different meaning. Ignoring such a context often leads to communicative misunderstandings, which are well illustrated by a joke.

There are two candidates of science. One, pointing with envy at the plump briefcase of the other :

“Do you have a doctor there?”

- No, unfortunately, just liver.

A simplified linear model of speech understanding is observed only in the case of perception of a text in a foreign language. A non-native language learner often encounters difficulties in identifying the meaning of tokens that do not “want” to form complete statements. These difficulties can be overcome if language learning is based on communicative techniques that use speech contexts and situations (speech genres) in which language units are used. Speech contexts and specific communicative situations and in the course of perception of native speech allow the addressee of communication to choose from a variety of options for the meaning of the word that which the speaker means.

Along with the vocabulary, in the process of understanding, an important role is played by the grammar, which knows the rules of a coherent utterance, that is, the laws of the connection of language units in the speech flow. The important condition here is how far the superficial syntactic structure of the phrase diverges from its deep structure. Recall that the deep syntactic structures are a reflection of common logical-thought patterns of expression of thought. In the total number of possible models of sentences, they are nuclear, the most frequently used and, therefore, the most easily perceived. So, usually a person better learns phrases built on the model:

S –––– → Р –––– → О

subject → predicate → object: "The boy called the dog." "The girl is drinking tea." In this case, the surface syntactic structure of the utterance does not disagree with the deep structure. In the same cases, when such a discrepancy is noted, the understanding of the sentences requires additional verbal transformation operations, in which the phrase is aligned with the deep structure. And the semantic perception of the phrases “A house is built by workers” or “A child is bitten by a dog” (O → P → S) implies their translation, reduction to the initial model (S → P → O) “Workers build a house” and “The dog bit the child”.

Even greater difficulties for understanding are the sentences built on the basis of semantic (semantic) in-

version. Such constructions include, for example, statements with a double negation: "I am not used to disobey the rules." Phrases close to this type are sentences like “He was the last in modesty”. Both in the first and second examples a translation into the language of nuclear deep structures is required. The first sentence means: "I used to obey the rules," the second - "He was the most impudent."

The object of understanding in speech communication is not a word, not a separate, isolated sentence, but a holistic text (discourse). Therefore, the success of decoding a message also depends on the peculiarities of the construction of a speech work, that is, its textual structure. In the section devoted to the peculiarities of the functioning of texts in speech activity, we dwelt on the concept of the psycholinguistic norm of textualness , that is, the optimal structure of the text, which corresponds to the sequence in which the speech work originates in linguistic consciousness . Recall that usually discourses corresponding to the textual norm are built on the principle of a hierarchy of topics: a common phrase for the whole text is outlined in the initial phrase (the message content is summarized), which is then divided into sub-themes (briefly conveying the content of significant fragments of a speech work), micro-sub-themes, etc. d.

If speech production is the unfolding of a plan according to a model that determines the textual norm, then text comprehension is the reverse process — this is the folding of a speech work to the original (nuclear) speech pattern formed in internal speech and transmitting the text's deep semantic structure. Exact speech reproduction is not his understanding. N. I. Zhinkin quite rightly wrote about this: “If our partner reproduces the literally accepted sequence of sentences, we will not know whether he understood what was said. Mechanical speech reproduction is not meaningful. ” A true understanding of the speech product is based on the selection of its nuclear meaning and the formulation of this meaning in the language of the addressee of speech. Simply put, to understand any text, the listener / reader must briefly convey its content in their own words.

With the importance of the lexical and grammatical side of decoding, knowledge of the language is not enough for the full semantic perception of the speech message. Of great importance here is

adequate reference , i.e., the correlation of the statement with the real event situation . As N. I. Zhinkin rightly pointed out, “we understand not speech (not text), but reality”.

Conduct a small experiment with friends and acquaintances. Ask your friend to answer the question: “Your mother's daughter, but not your sister. Who is this? "(A friend, respectively:" Your father's son, but not your brother. Who is this? "). To accomplish this simple task, you need to scroll through the head in different situations of possible kinship relationships. Then it becomes clear that the only answer may be “I”.

The ability to properly correlate speech with reality underlies many tests that determine a person’s intellectual level. For example:

Olya is lighter than Sonya, darker than Kati. Which of them is the darkest and who is the lightest?

The answer to this question requires building a whole hierarchy of real situations. Only after that can we say that the brightest is Katya, and the darkest is Sonya.

The situation is even more complicated with the understanding of reality reflected in the whole text. In real communication, communicative misunderstandings are possible here, which we can again illustrate with an old joke.

At night there was a knock at the window.

- Boss, need firewood?

- No, not needed.

The next morning look: in the courtyard the wood disappeared.

Ignorance of reality, which is behind the statement, becomes the cause of communication misunderstandings. Let us recall the song about the fisherman Kostya, who brought "barges full of mullet" to Odessa. In it, for example, there are such words: "The bird-cherry was covered over the fountain," but "Moldavian and Peresyp adore Kostya the Sailor" as well. If you don’t know the realities of Odessa, namely: the Fountain, Moldavanka, Peresyp - districts of the city - you can get into a dead end: how can the fountain be covered with bird cherry? What kind of Moldavian and peresyp that adore character songs?

In addition to reality, which lies behind the speech work, the text bears a holistic meaning associated with the motive of speech, with the goal (intention) that the author of the statement pursues. Sometimes the meaning of the message lies on the surface, arising from the values ​​of the phrases included in the text. Then identifying it

It requires only the ability to distinguish the most important in the informative relation keywords and nuclear phrases in a speech work. A fast reading technique based on texts that do not contain subtext: scientific articles, newspapers, magazines, etc., is based on this, by the way. Many students, faced with the need to master a large number of works for examinations in a short time, involuntarily discover this method of reading “Diagonally”, when in a readable text, the most important in terms of information are highlighted.

However, speech messages often carry the speaker’s implicitly expressed intention, a hidden meaning. When students tell a teacher in class:

- It's four o'clock!

- It's cold in the audience, we are so cold! - this does not mean that they aim to kindly tell you what time it is or characterize their physical condition. The subtext of the replicas is simple: “let us go, miserable, with a lecture earlier!”

The hidden meaning is present in proverbs and sayings. There is he and in artistic texts. And in different works there is a “depth” of reading. The most obvious subtext in the literature for children, where, as a rule, there is always a moral and tendentious beginning. Take for example an excerpt from the story E. Schwartz "Alien Girl."

Marusia, having quarreled with the boys, got into the boat alone and drove down the river. The boys remembered - there is a dam. They went on a search, suddenly Serezha saw some red object, he was floating on the river. His heart pounded, it was Marusina the red cap.

The text can be perceived as a simple listing of events. But the penetration into the semantic subtext makes the reader make the assumption that a misfortune happened to the heroine of the story,

And here is an example of another kind - humorous stories. Zubkov's “Treshka”, the comic effect of which is built on the fact that his hero (he is the narrator) pretends not to understand the subtext of the interlocutor's speech.

Here comes one recently:

- Listen, could you lend a treshka?

“Could,” I say. And I go my own way.

- Where are you going? - asks.

- In the bakery, - I answer.

“I need a treshka,” he says.

“Me too,” I say.

- So you can not borrow, or what? - asks.

- Why? I can - I answer.

- Well? - He speaks.

- What - "well"? - I say.

- So why not lend? - asks.

- So you do not ask, - I answer.

- How not to ask? Please - says. - I just want to be polite:

“I didn't even say hello,” I say.

- Well, hello - says. - You have no money, or what?

- Hello, - I say. - Have money.

- So could you lend a treshka? - asks.

- Could, - I answer. And I go my own way.

Then he suddenly shouts!

- Hang on you, - shouts, - his treshka!

Very strange man.

Once again we repeat an important thought for us: true understanding must be distinguished from memorizing a text. Many students and schoolchildren, especially of the senior classes, substitute for ordinary cramming the full-fledged mastery of knowledge. Memory training comes to the point that, going to the exam, a student can mentally “take a picture” of a textbook text or a lecture, and then, answering, as if reading it from a sheet in front of his mind. However, after leaving the audience, he completely forgets everything that he just spoke to the teacher. Needless to say that such perception is meaningless. The thoughtless reproduction of the text often leads to its distortion, and the units from which the speech work is built usually do not change, but the meaning can be disfigured to the opposite. The answers of students "cram" demonstrate this feature most clearly.

A good illustration of the above reasoning can be found in the book “Sociodynamics of Culture” by the French researcher A. Mole. Here is a typical for the army life situation of information transfer (order) along the chain from the captain through the adjutant, sergeant and corporal to the soldiers.

1. Captain - adjutant:

“As you know, tomorrow there will be a solar eclipse, and this does not happen every day. Gather staff tomorrow at 5 o'clock on the parade ground in hiking clothing. They will be able to observe this phenomenon, and I will give them the necessary explanations. If it rains, there will be nothing to observe, so in that case, leave the people in the barracks. ”

2. Adjutant - Duty Sergeant:

“By the order of the captain, tomorrow morning at 5 o'clock, there will be a solar eclipse in hiking clothing. The captain on the parade ground will give the necessary explanations, and this does not happen every day. If it rains, there will be nothing to observe, but then the phenomenon will take place in the barracks. ”

3. The duty sergeant - Corporal:

“By the order of the captain tomorrow morning at 5 o'clock, the eclipse on the parade ground of people in marching clothes. The captain will give the necessary explanations in the barracks about this rare phenomenon, if it rains, and this does not happen every day. ”

4. Corporal on duty for soldiers:

“Tomorrow at 5 o'clock the captain will produce a solar eclipse in marching clothes on the parade ground. If it is raining, this rare phenomenon will take place in the barracks, and this does not happen every day. ”

5. One soldier to another:

“Tomorrow, very early, at 5 o'clock, the sun on the parade ground will produce an eclipse of the captain in the barracks. If it is raining, this rare phenomenon will take place in hiking clothes, and this does not happen every day. ”

We emphasize once again: a significant role in the process of perception of a statement is played by the reciprocal mental activity of the addressee of speech, which triggers the mechanism of proactive understanding and prediction in speech activity.