Associative experiment as a method for studying meanings. Section vii

Philological sciences

Keywords: THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE; LINGUISTIC PICTURE OF THE WORLD; LINGUISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS; ASSOCIATIVE EXPERIMENT; COGNITIVE CULTUROLOGY; THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE; LANGUAGE PICTURE OF THE WORLD; LANGUAGE CONSCIOUSNESS; ASSOCIATIVE EXPERIMENT; COGNITIVE CULTURAL STUDIES.

Annotation: This article substantiates the effectiveness of the use of psycholinguistic methods in the field of linguoculturological knowledge. The results of the study can be used for further development of a special culturological direction — cognitive culturology. The concept theory proposed in this paper can become methodological basis for the reconstruction of specific cultural concepts and concept spheres. These articles can be used in the courses of linguistics, regional studies, lexicology, stylistics, in special courses on linguoculturology, and also serve to understand the cultural values ​​of a certain people for representatives of another language space.

One of the main categories of modern culture is the concept, which allows you to overcome the gap between the objective world and the inner mentality of a person, as well as to include in scientific knowledge concepts of irrational knowledge of the world. According to Yu.S. Stepanova, the concept is the main unit of culture in the mental world of a person. A. Vezhbitskaya defines a concept as “an object from the “Ideal” world, which has a name and reflects certain culturally conditioned ideas of a person about the world “Reality”.

The term “concept” itself (from Latin conceptus – “thought”, “concept”), according to the Concise Dictionary of Cognitive Terms, “corresponds to the idea of ​​those meanings that a person operates in the processes of thinking and which reflect the content of experience and knowledge, the content the results of all human activity and the processes of cognition of the world in the form of certain "quanta" of knowledge.

In this regard, a relatively new direction in psycholinguistics and cultural studies has arisen - cognitive linguoculturology, which makes it possible to trace the relationship of linguistic forms with the cultural characteristics of people of different ethnic groups. In this direction, at least important role is played by the consciousness of a person, which is directly influenced by the cultural characteristics of his society. In cognitive cultural studies, the concept is presented as a unit of structured and unstructured knowledge, which forms the cognition of an individual and culture as a whole, while culture itself is “the interaction of consciousness with outside world» . Therefore, the use of a cognitive approach and psycholinguistic methods in tracing the evolution of various concepts and the reconstruction of cultural concepts allows us to gain new knowledge about the formation of a linguistic picture of the world, the peculiarities of thinking of representatives different cultures, the value priorities of the people, as well as the ways of perception and understanding of the surrounding world within a certain cultural society. The connection of the concept with the picture of the world is also emphasized by the authors of the Concise Dictionary of Cognitive Terms, defining it as a term that serves to explain the mental or mental resources of our consciousness and that information structure, which reflects the knowledge and experience of a person; operational content unit of memory, mental lexicon, conceptual system and the language of the brain (lingua mentalis), the whole picture of the world reflected in the human psyche.

In the monograph "Language Circle: Personality, Concepts, Discourse" Professor V.I. Karasik notes that "the main unit of linguoculturology is the cultural concept - a multidimensional semantic formation in which the value, figurative and conceptual sides are distinguished" . Within the framework of linguoculturology and psycholinguistics, the concept is defined as a unit of individual and collective knowledge, which has a cultural marking and has a linguistic expression. The cultural concept itself is, first of all, a mental entity that reflects the “spirit of the people”.

The reconstruction of the concept in linguoculturology is based on the approaches of Yu. Stepanov, A. Vezhbitskaya and the school of logical analysis of language. Yu.S. Stepanov proposed a semiotic method, which is aimed at analyzing the formation of a cultural concept. This approach is characterized by the involvement of a broad philological and cultural contexts. According to this technique, cultural concepts are analyzed as a "layered" formation, in which it is first necessary to identify the "literal meaning" of the word ( inner shape), presented "in the form of etymology", then - the "historical" (passive) layer of the concept, and at the last stage its actual layer is studied. According to the methodology of A. Vezhbitskaya, the study should begin with the choice of the name of the concept. In this approach, it is important to take into account the frequency of the use of the name and the "cultural development" of the corresponding fragment of the linguistic picture of the world. This method research also involves the analysis of diverse means of naming concepts. However, a unified approach to the concept research methodology in modern linguistic and cultural studies has not yet been developed.

In our opinion, one of the most preferred methods reconstruction of the concepts of culture is a psycholinguistic technique - associative experiment.

Psycholinguistics, a discipline that emerged in 1953, is located at the intersection of psychology and linguistics and studies the relationship between language, thinking and consciousness.

In psycholinguistics, there are three main methods for collecting linguistic material, which are borrowed from experimental psychology.

1. The method of introspection or self-observation (from Latin introspecto “look inside”) was proposed by W. Wundt. The essence of this method is to observe your own mental processes without the use of tools or standards.

2. Method of observation in vivo- involves the explanation of a mental phenomenon in the process of a specially organized situation of its perception.

3. experimental method. This method is currently the main research method in psycholinguistics. In turn, it distinguishes several methods, one of which is an associative experiment. association experiment- a term that has established itself in psychology to refer to a special projective method for studying personality motivation, which was proposed at the beginning of the 20th century. C. G. Jung and almost simultaneously with him M. Wertheimer and D. Klein.

Procedure association experiment is as follows. Subjects are required to respond to a specific set of stimulus words as quickly as possible with any word that comes to mind. Thus, the type of associations that arise, the frequency of associations of the same type, the magnitude of latent periods (the time between the stimulus word and the subject's response), behavioral and physiological reactions, etc., are recorded.

An association experiment is also often used as a group test, for example, to determine the frequency of use of a particular word or to identify the prevalence of a particular cultural value in a given society.

In this regard, we conducted a psycholinguistic test on the example of representatives of Russian and Tajik culture. We used the associative method or otherwise the psycholinguistic method on the topic "Beauty". Our target audience was students of the branch of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov in Dushanbe, as well as residents of Tajikistan who are not native Russian speakers. The experiment involved 25 people.

These persons were asked to write all the associations, including sayings, proverbs, phraseological units that arise with the word beauty, in Russian and Tajik languages, with inherent characteristics inherent in Russian and Tajik culture. Here we have listed all the associations that we received during the study (Table 1.).

Table 1. Associative experiment on the example of the word "beauty".

In applied psycholinguistics, associative dictionaries have been created on the basis of an associative experiment. It should also be noted that most of the reactions given in the associative dictionaries were obtained mainly from university and college students aged 17 to 25 years (in this case, stimulus words were given on mother tongue subjects). The first associative dictionary is the Dictionary of Associative Norms of the Russian Language, which was compiled by a team of authors led by Alexei Alekseevich Leontiev. On the this moment the most complete dictionary of this type is the "Russian Associative Dictionary" by Yuri Nikolaevich Karaulov, Yuri Alexandrovich Sorokin, Evgeny Fedorovich Tarasov, Natalia Vladimirovna Ufimtseva. It consists of approximately 1300 stimulus words.

Bibliography

1. Vezhbitskaya A. Semantic universals and description of languages. M., 1999.
2. Vezhbitskaya A. Prototypes and invariants //A. Vezhbitskaya. Language. Culture. Cognition./Answer. ed. M. A. Krongauz. M., 1996.
3. Karpenko L. A., Petrovsky A. V., Yaroshevsky M. G. Brief psychological dictionary. - Rostov-on-Don: PHOENIX. 1998.
4. Karasik V. I. Language circle: personality, concepts, discourse: monograph / Karasik V. I. - 2nd ed. — M.: Gnosis, 2004.
5. Kubryakova E. S., Demyankov V. Z., Pankrats Yu. G., Luzina L. G. Concise Dictionary cognitive terms. M., 1996.
6. Rezhabek E.Ya. In search of rationality. M., 2007.
7. Serova I.G. Conceptual analysis in linguoculturology: methods and possibilities // Questions of cognitive linguistics. 2007. No. 1.
8. Stepanov Yu. S. Constants: Dictionary of Russian culture. Research experience. M., 1997.

Associative experiment is the most developed technique of psycholinguistic analysis of semantics.

2.1. Association experiment. The subjects are presented with a list of words and told that they need to answer the first words that come to mind. Usually each subject is given 100 words and 7-10 minutes for answers. Majority reactions, cited in associative dictionaries, received from students of universities and colleges aged 17-25 years, for whom the language incentives is native.

There are several types of associative experiment:

Free association experiment. Subjects are not given any restrictions on reactions.

Directed associative experiment. The subject is asked to give associations of a certain grammatical or semantic class (for example, choose an adjective for a noun).

Chain association experiment. Subjects are asked to respond to stimulus several associations - for example, give 10 reactions within 20 seconds.

There are special dictionaries of association norms, among the well-known ones is the dictionary of J. Deese (J. Deese. The Structure of associations in language and Thought. Baltimore, 1965). In Russian, the first dictionary of this kind was the Dictionary of Associative Norms of the Russian Language, ed. A.A. Leontiev (Moscow, 1977).

At present, the most complete dictionary in Russian (and in principle) is the “Russian Associative Dictionary” (compiled by: Yu.N. Karaulov, Yu.A. Sorokin, E.F. Tarasov, N.V. Ufimtseva, G. A. Cherkasova. - M., 1994-2002). It includes the following parts: v. 1. Direct dictionary: from stimulus to response; v. 2. Reverse dictionary: from response to stimulus; v. 3-6 are also direct and reverse dictionaries of the other two lists of words. This dictionary contains 1277 stimuli, which is slightly less than the number of words used by speakers in everyday speech (1500-3000); 12 600 recorded as answers different words, and in total - more than a million reactions.

Structure dictionary entry in the "Russian Associative Dictionary" is as follows: first the headword is given, then the reactions are arranged in descending order of frequency (indicated by a number). Within the groups, the reactions follow in alphabetical order (5):

FOREST... field, trees 11, autumn, large, birch 7, etc. Numbers (6) are given at the end of each article:

FOREST... 549 +186 + 0 + 119.

The first digit indicates the total number of reactions to stimuli, the second - the number of different reactions, the third - the number of subjects who left this stimulus unanswered, i.e. the number of failures. Fourth - the number of single answers, i.e. reactions that were given only once and whose frequency is, respectively, one.

2.2. Interpretation of the answers of the associative experiment. There are many possibilities for interpreting the results of an association experiment. Without going into scientific disputes, we will consider some of them.

When analyzing the answers of an associative experiment, syntagmatic (7) and paradigmatic (8) associations are distinguished, first of all:

the sky is blue, the car is driving, smoking is bad

table - chair, father- mother

Syntagmatic associations are associations whose grammatical class is different from the grammatical class of the word. stimulus. Paradigmatic associations are reaction words of the same grammatical class as stimulus words. They obey the principle of "minimal contrast", according to which the less stimulus words differ from reaction words in terms of the composition of semantic components, the more likely the reaction word is actualized in the associative process. This principle explains why the semantic composition of the stimulus word can be restored by the nature of the associations: the set of associations issued for the word contains a number of features similar to those contained in the stimulus word (9).

native speaker by reactions can be easily restored stimulus(in case (9) this is vacation).

(9) summer; summer 10; rest 6; short, soon, cheers 4; idleness, in Prostokvashino, began, school

It is believed that paradigmatic associations reflect linguistic relations, and syntagmatic associations reflect speech relations.

There are also genus-species relations (10), reactions that have phonetic similarity with the stimulus (11), clichéd (12) and personal (13):

animal - cat, table - furniture

House- tom, mouse- book

master - golden hands, guest- stone

man - I have to

2.3. Significance of the results of the associative experiment. The associative experiment is widely known and actively used in psycholinguistics, psychology, sociology, and psychiatry.

The results of the associative experiment can be used, first of all, in different areas of linguistics. In particular, due to the fact that it is usually carried out on in large numbers subjects, you can build a table of the frequency distribution of words-reactions to each word-stimulus. In this case, it will be possible to calculate the semantic proximity (semantic distance) between different words. A measure of the semantic similarity of a pair of words is the degree of coincidence of the distribution of answers, i.e. the similarity of their associations. This value appears in the works of different authors under different names: "intersection coefficient", "association coefficient", "overlap measure".

Determining the semantic distance between words can help solve one of the possible problems for linguistics - synonymy. So, if you need to determine the degree of similarity between words that have a similar meaning (14), then you can ask different people and everyone will imagine this similarity in a different way. Yes, for someone Job will look like a business, but for someone work. Or you can also invite the subjects to give reactions to each of these words (it is better to present them separately - in a list with other words), and then see how many reactions match. In this case, it may turn out that some pairs of words are “closer” to each other than others. (In this case, the closest pair was work - work, followed by a couple a business- Job, and then labor is business). Thus, a survey of a large number of subjects using an associative experiment will show a measure of semantic proximity between these words. (fourteen) work, work, work

Sometimes this kind of data coincides with the results of distributive-statistical analysis of texts, when researchers do not refer to the experiment, but carry out an independent count of word combinations (the so-called distribution). The associative experiment, on the other hand, makes it possible to find out how fragments of linguistic consciousness are arranged in native speakers.

At one time, J. Deese tried to reconstruct the semantic composition of a word based on an associative experiment. matrices semantic distances Secondary associations to the word-stimulus (ie, associations to associations) he subjected to the factor analysis procedure. The selected factors received a meaningful interpretation and acted as semantic components of the meaning. A.A. Leontiev, commenting on the results of Deese, believed that they clearly show the very possibility of identifying, on the basis of a formal processing of the data of an associative experiment, factors that can be interpreted meaningfully as semantic components of words. And thus, an associative experiment can serve as a way of obtaining both linguistic and psychological knowledge.

Precisely because during the associative experiment the subject is asked to respond to a particular word with the first word or phrase that comes to mind, very interesting results can be obtained (15):

(15) STUDENT(652 people) - institute 44, eternal 41, student 39, poor 34, correspondence student 28, cheerful 20, young, good 18, bad 16, scholarship 14, exam I, applicant, martyr, teacher 10, eternal feeling of hunger, wine, hunger, hungry, wonderful times, psychosis, five years of rest - twenty minutes of shame 1.

The associative experiment shows the presence in the meaning of the word (as well as the object denoted by the word) of a psychological component. Thus, the associative experiment makes it possible to build the semantic structure of the word. It serves as a valuable material for studying the psychological equivalents of what is called the semantic field in linguistics, and reveals the semantic connections of words objectively existing in the psyche of a native speaker.

In the same connection, it should be noted that the main advantage of the associative experiment is its simplicity, ease of use, since it can be carried out with a large group of subjects simultaneously. The subjects work with the meaning of the word in the "mode of use", which makes it possible to single out some unconscious components of the meaning. So, according to the results of the experiment, it turns out that in the word exam in the minds of native speakers of the Russian language (and, accordingly, culture) there is such a psychological moment of this word as difficult, fearful, terrible, difficult(16). It is absent in linguistic dictionaries.

(16) EXAM(626 people) - difficult 87, pass 48, pass 35, session 26, pass 21, ticket 18, soon 17, math 13, matriculation, fear 10, terrible 8, heavy 6.

A feature of associative reactions to a word is that subjects may be sensitive to the phonological and syntactic level of the stimulus word.

Note that some phonetic associations can also be considered as semantic ones (17). They are usually given to subjects who are unwilling to cooperate with the experimenters, or in a state of fatigue (for example, at the end of a long experiment), as well as to mentally retarded subjects.

Some reactions (18) can be interpreted both as semantic and as phonetic. They are most often given to test subjects in a state of fatigue or mentally retarded test subjects.

(17) mother - frame, house - smoke, guest- bone

Most of the associations are due to speech stamps, clichés. At the same time, the associations also reflect various aspects of the native culture of the subject (18) and textual reminiscences (19).

area- Red

master - Margarita

It is important to note that the plane of verbal associations is not completely isomorphic to the plane of object relations. So, for example, in the experiments of the 30s, Karwosky and Dorkus showed that colors are associated differently than the words denoting them (along with the words-names of the color, the subjects were presented with cards different color). In other words, in the minds of the subjects, the colors themselves are connected in a slightly different way than the words that designate them.

The associative experiment is of particular importance for psychologists, since it is one of the oldest methods of experimental psychology. George Miller very vividly describes the history of this technique. Sir Francis Galton, an English scientist and cousin of Charles Darwin, first tried an association experiment in 1879. He chose 75 words, wrote each of them on a separate card and did not touch them for several days. Then he took the cards one by one and looked at them. He kept time on a chronometer, starting from the moment when his eyes stopped on a word, and ending with the moment when the word he read caused him two different thoughts. He wrote down these thoughts for every word on the list, but declined to release the results. “They lay bare,” wrote Galton, “the essence of human thought with such amazing distinctness and certainty that it would hardly be possible to preserve if they were published and made public to the world.”

Currently, a similar technique is known as the Kent-Rozanov free association technique (G. H. Kent, A. J. Rozanoff). It uses a set of 100 words as stimuli. Speech reactions to these words are standardized on a large number of mentally healthy individuals, and specific gravity non-standard speech reactions (their correlation with standard ones). These data allow us to determine the degree of eccentricity, unusual thinking of specific subjects.

associative field each person has his own both in terms of the composition of the names, and in terms of the strength of the connections between them. The actualization of this or that connection in the answer is not accidental and may even depend on the situation (20). Undoubtedly, the influence of the level of education of a person on the structure of his mental lexicon. Thus, associative experiments on the material of the Russian and Estonian languages ​​revealed that persons with higher technical education give more often paradigmatic associations, and with the humanitarian - syntagmatic.

(20) friend - bear

The nature of associations is affected by age, geographical conditions, and the profession of a person. According to A.A. Leontiev, different reactions to the same stimulus were given by a resident of Yaroslavl (21) or Dushanbe (22), a conductor (23), a nurse (24) and a builder (25).

brush- mountain ash

brush - grape

brush - smooth, brush- soft

hand - amputation

brush - hair

However, belonging to a certain people, one culture makes the "center" of the associative field as a whole quite stable, and connections - regularly repeated in given language(26, 27, 28). According to the Tver psycholinguist A.A. Zalevskaya, associations also depend on the cultural and historical traditions of the people - Russian (29), Uzbek (30), French (31).

poet - Pushkin

number - three

friend- comrade, friend - enemy, friend- loyal

bread - salt

bread- tea

bread - wine.

The data obtained by comparing associations in a historical perspective are indicative. So, when we compared associations to the same stimuli, it turned out that the three most frequent reactions to the word stimulus in 1910 averaged about 46% of all responses, and in 1954 - already about 60% of all responses, those. the most frequent reactions became much more frequent. This means that as a result of standard education, the spread of television and other mass media, the stereotype of reactions has increased, people have begun to think more alike.

The question of the need for an experiment for linguistics was first raised in 1938 by L.V. Shcherba in the already mentioned article “On the Triple Aspect of Linguistic Phenomena and on the Experiment in Linguistics”. The scientist believed that “it is possible to derive a language system, that is, a dictionary and grammar”, from “corresponding texts, that is, from the corresponding language material”. In his opinion, it is absolutely obvious that no other method exists and cannot exist in application to dead languages. At the same time, L.V. Shcherba noted that languages ​​become dead when they cease to serve as an instrument of communication and thinking within the human collective, they then cease to develop and adapt to the expression of new concepts and their shades, they stop what can be called the language-creative process.

Things should be somewhat different, he wrote, in relation to living languages. According to Shcherba, “most linguists usually approach living languages, however, in the same way as they approach dead ones, i.e. accumulates linguistic material, in other words, writes down texts, and then processes them according to the principles of dead languages. Shcherba believed "that this results in dead dictionaries and grammars." He believed that "a student of living languages ​​should act differently."

“The researcher,” Shcherba wrote, “must also proceed from the language material understood in one way or another. But, having built some abstract system from the facts of this material, it is necessary to check | "it on new facts, i.e., to see whether the facts derived from it correspond to reality. Thus, principle I is introduced into linguistics experiment. Having made some assumption about the meaning of this or that word, this or that form, about this or that rule of word formation or form formation, etc., one should try whether it is possible | to connect a number of different forms using this rule.

Shcherba also wrote that the experiment can have both positive \ ny, and a negative result. Negative results indicate either the incorrectness of the postulated rule, or the need for some of its restrictions, or the fact that the rule no longer exists, but there are only dictionary facts, etc. Giving examples of correct |; (1-3) and incorrect (4) sentences, Shcherba argued that a language researcher should address the question of the correctness or incorrectness of linguistic material to a native speaker, not relying only on his intuition.At the same time, he believed that this kind of experiment is already being carried out in nature when a child learns talk or when an adult is studying foreign language, or in pathology, when the disintegration of speech occurs.

(1) There was no trade in the city.

(2) There was no trade in the city.

I(3) There was no trade in the city.

I (4) * There was no trade in the city.

The researcher also mentioned the mistakes of writers, believing that "lapses" are associated with a poor sense of language. It is noteworthy that at the same time, Freud wrote about slips of the tongue and slips, interpreting this in the paradigm of psychoanalysis. At the same time, under the experiment in linguistics Shcherba implied | 1) introspection, self-observation, and 2) setting up the actual experiment. He wrote about the principle of experiment as important point, which allows you to penetrate deeper into the understanding of human speech activity. Since he wrote this in the 30s of the 20th century, when there was a struggle of opinions in Soviet linguistics, the scientist, fearing accusations of individualism, proved the methodological correctness of the method he proposed. So, in addition to what was said, Shcherba added: “With a very common fear that with such a method K, an “individual speech system” will be investigated, and not a linguistic one.

system must end once and for all. After all, the individual speech system is only a concrete manifestation of the language system. Even if we follow a narrow understanding of the role of experiment in linguistics as a verification of the provisions of a normative language system with the facts of a living language, we should recognize, following the scientist, that linguistic knowledge makes it possible to understand human consciousness.

Domestic psycholinguist L.V. Sakharny noted that supporters traditional methods linguistic analysis, there are a number of objections to experiment. They usually boil down to the following:

1. The materials of the experiments are very interesting, but you never know what the subjects can say on the instructions of the experimenter? How to prove that the experiment reveals really linguistic rules?

2. In the experiment, deliberately artificial situations are created, which is not typical for the natural functioning of language and speech.

3. Spontaneous speech sometimes reveals something that cannot be organized by any experiment, i.e. the possibilities of experimental methods are quite limited.

Sakharny believed that these questions could be answered in the following way:

1. The question is what is being studied in the experiment - language or speech? Traditional linguistics recognizes that it is impossible to enter the language otherwise than through speech. But if you study language through spontaneous texts, why not study it through texts obtained in experiments? (Recall that in linguistics, language is understood as a system, and speech as its implementation.)

2. Although the situations in the experiment are also artificial, the fundamental features of speech activity that are revealed in the experiment are characteristic of speech activity in other, non-experimental situations. It is impossible to draw a clear line between typical and atypical, natural and artificial situations.

3. Experiment is not the only possible method of psycholinguistic research. Psycholinguistics does not deny either the material or the method of observation that traditional linguistics has at its disposal. Psycholinguistics uses this material, but from a slightly different angle, in a broader context of both material and methods. Both verbal and non-verbal contexts are taken into account, and general terms and Conditions activities, and the intention of the communicant, and the state of the participants in communication.

As a feature of the language of Russian psycholinguistics, it can be noted that it uses the concept of "subject" and not "informant". Informant(from Latin informatio - clarification, presentation) - this is a subject included in the experiment and informing the experimenter about its progress, about the features of its interaction with the object. test subject- this is a subject who, being a native speaker, is also an expert in the field of its use, and at the same time indirectly informs the experimenter about fragments of his linguistic consciousness. In other words, psycholinguistics accepts the fact of subjective interpretation of linguistic material by a native speaker not as a factor of interference, but as a fact subject to scientific analysis.

An important feature psycholinguistics is an appeal to the meaning of the word - to its semantics (from the Greek. semantikos - denoting). In linguistics, the analysis of semantics is associated primarily with the study lexical meaning words and expressions, changing their meanings, studying turns of speech or grammatical forms. Psycholinguistics distinguishes between objective and subjective semantics. The first is a semantic system of language meanings, the second is presented as an associative system that exists in the mind of an individual. In this regard, semantic features are divided into those related to the field of associations (subjective) and belonging to the semantic components of the vocabulary, taken in an abstract-logical (objective) plan. The psycholinguistic concept of "semantic field" is a collection of words together with their associations.

One of the attempts to experimentally determine subjective semantic fields and connections within them is the method of associative experiment.

2. Association experiment

Associative experiment is the most developed technique of psycholinguistic analysis of semantics.

2.1. Association experiment. The subjects are presented with a list of words and told that they need to answer the first words that come to mind. Usually each subject is given 100 words and 7-10 minutes for answers. Majority reactions, given in associative dictionaries, received from students128129

universities and colleges aged 17-25 for which the language incentives is native.

There are several types of associative experiment:

1. Free associative experiment. Subjects are not given
no restrictions on reactions.

2. Directed associative experiment. Subject before
is supposed to give associations of a certain grammatical or se
mantic class (for example, pick up an adjective for a creature
body).

3. Chain association experiment. The subjects of the offer
to respond to stimulus several associations - for example,
give 10 reactions within 20 seconds.

There are special dictionaries of association norms, among the well-known ones is the dictionary of J. Deese (J. Deese. The Structure of associations in language and Thought. Baltimore, 1965). In Russian, the first dictionary of this kind was the Dictionary of Associative Norms of the Russian Language, ed. A.A. Leontiev (Moscow, 1977).

At present, the most complete dictionary in Russian (and in principle) is the “Russian Associative Dictionary” (compiled by: Yu.N. Karaulov, Yu.A. Sorokin, E.F. Tarasov, N.V. Ufimtseva, G. A. Cherkasova. - M., 1994-2002). It includes the following parts: v. 1. Direct dictionary: from stimulus to response; v. 2. Reverse dictionary: from response to stimulus; v. 3-6 are also direct and reverse dictionaries of the other two lists of words. This dictionary contains 1277 stimuli, which is slightly less than the number of words used by speakers in everyday speech (1500-3000); 12,600 different words were recorded as answers, and in total - more than a million reactions.

The structure of the dictionary entry in the "Russian Associative Dictionary" is as follows: first, the headword is given, then the reactions are arranged in descending order of frequency (indicated by a number). Within the groups, the reactions follow in alphabetical order (5):

(5) FOREST... field, trees 11, autumn, large, birch 7, etc.
Numbers (6) are given at the end of each article:

(6) FOREST... 549 +186 + 0 + 119.

The first digit indicates the total number of reactions to stimuli, the second - the number of different reactions, the third - the number of subjects who left this stimulus unanswered, i.e. the number of failures. Fourth - the number of single answers, i.e. reactions that

were given only once and the frequency of which is, respectively, one.

2.2. Interpretation of the answers of the associative experiment. There is
many possibilities for interpreting the results of the associative experiment
rimenta. Without going into scientific disputes, let's look at some of them.

When analyzing the answers of an associative experiment, syntagmatic (7) and paradigmatic (8) associations are distinguished, first of all:

(7) the sky is blue, the car is driving, smoking is bad

(8) table - chair, father- mother

Syntagmatic associations are associations whose grammatical class is different from the grammatical class of the word. stimulus. Paradigmatic associations are reaction words of the same grammatical class as stimulus words. They obey the principle of "minimal contrast", according to which the less stimulus words differ from reaction words in terms of the composition of semantic components, the more likely the reaction word is actualized in the associative process. This principle explains why the semantic composition of the stimulus word can be restored by the nature of the associations: the set of associations issued for the word contains a number of features similar to those contained in the stimulus word (9).

native speaker by reactions can be easily restored stimulus(in case (9) this is vacation).

(9) summer I; summer 10; rest 6; short, soon, cheers 4; idleness,
in Prostokvashino, school has begun

It is believed that paradigmatic associations reflect linguistic relations, and syntagmatic associations reflect speech relations.

There are also genus-species relations (10), reactions that have a phonetic similarity with the stimulus (11), clichéd (12) and personal (13):

(10) animal - cat, table - furniture

(11) home- tom, mouse- book

(12) master - golden hands, guest- stone

(13) man - I must

2.3. Significance of the results of the associative experiment. Asso
The creative experiment is widely known and actively used in psy
holinguistics, psychology, sociology, psychiatry.

The results of the associative experiment can be used, first of all, in different areas linguistics. In particular, due to the fact that it is usually carried out on a large number of subjects, it is possible to construct a table of the frequency distribution of words-reactions to

every word is a stimulus. In this case, it will be possible to calculate the semantic proximity (semantic distance) between different words. A measure of the semantic similarity of a pair of words is the degree of coincidence of the distribution of answers, i.e. the similarity of their associations. This value appears in the works of different authors under different names: "intersection coefficient", "association coefficient", "overlap measure".

Determining the semantic distance between words can help solve one of the possible problems for linguistics - synonymy. So, if you need to determine the degree of similarity between words that have a similar meaning (14), then you can interview different people and everyone will imagine this similarity in different ways. Yes, for someone Job will look like a business, but for someone work. Or you can also invite the subjects to give reactions to each of these words (it is better to present them separately - in a list with other words), and then see how many reactions match. In this case, it may turn out that some pairs of words are “closer” to each other than others. (In this case, the closest pair was work - work, followed by a couple a business- Job, and then labor is business). Thus, a survey of a large number of subjects using an associative experiment will show a measure of semantic proximity between these words. (fourteen) work, work, work

Sometimes this kind of data coincides with the results of distributive-statistical analysis of texts, when researchers do not refer to the experiment, but carry out an independent count of word combinations (the so-called distribution). The associative experiment, on the other hand, makes it possible to find out how fragments of linguistic consciousness are arranged in native speakers.

At one time, J. Deese tried to reconstruct the semantic composition of a word on the basis of an associative experiment. matrices semantic distances Secondary associations to the stimulus word (ie, associations to associations) he subjected to the factor analysis procedure. The selected factors received a meaningful interpretation and acted as semantic components of the meaning. A.A. Leontiev, commenting on the results of Deese, believed that they clearly show the very possibility of identifying, on the basis of a formal processing of the data of an associative experiment, factors that can be interpreted meaningfully as semantic components of words. And thus, an associative experiment can serve as a way to obtain both linguistic and psychological knowledge.

It is precisely because during the associative experiment that the subject is asked to respond to a particular word with the first word or phrase that comes to mind, very interesting results can be obtained (15):

(15) STUDENT(652 people) - institute 44, eternal 41, student
ka 39, poor 34, correspondence student 28, cheerful 20, young, good 18,
bad 16, scholarship 14, exam I, entrant, martyr,
teacher 10, eternal feeling of hunger, wine, hunger, go
loden, great times, psychosis, five years of rest - two
twenty minutes of shame 1.

The associative experiment shows the presence in the meaning of the word (as well as the object denoted by the word) of a psychological component. Thus, the associative experiment makes it possible to build the semantic structure of the word. It serves as a valuable material for studying the psychological equivalents of what is called the semantic field in linguistics, and reveals the semantic connections of words objectively existing in the psyche of a native speaker.

In the same connection, it should be noted that the main advantage of the associative experiment is its simplicity, ease of use, since it can be carried out with a large group of subjects simultaneously. The subjects work with the meaning of the word in the "mode of use", which makes it possible to single out some unconscious components of the meaning. So, according to the results of the experiment, it turns out that in the word exam in the minds of native speakers of the Russian language (and, accordingly, culture) there is such a psychological moment of this word as difficult, fearful, terrible, difficult(16). It is absent in linguistic dictionaries.

(16) EXAM(626 people) - difficult 87, pass 48, pass 35,
session 26, pass 21, ticket 18, soon 17, math 13, on
matriculation, fear 10, terrible 8, severe 6.

A feature of associative reactions to a word is that subjects may be sensitive to the phonological and syntactic level of the stimulus word.

Note that some phonetic associations can also be considered as semantic ones (17). They are usually given to subjects who are unwilling to cooperate with the experimenters, or in a state of fatigue (for example, at the end of a long experiment), as well as to mentally retarded subjects.

Some reactions (18) can be interpreted both as semantic and as phonetic. They are most often given to test subjects in a state of fatigue or mentally retarded test subjects.

(17) mother - frame, house - smoke, guest- bone

Most of associations due speech stamps, cliche. At the same time, the associations also reflect various aspects of the native culture of the subject (18) and textual reminiscences (19).

(18) area- Red

(19) master - Margarita

It is important to note that the plane of verbal associations is not completely isomorphic to the plane of object relations. So, for example, in the experiments of the 1930s, Karwosky and Dorcus showed that colors are associated differently than the words denoting them (along with the color names, the subjects were presented with cards of different colors). In other words, in the minds of the subjects, the colors themselves are connected in a slightly different way than the words that designate them.

The associative experiment is of particular importance for psychologists, since it is one of the oldest methods of experimental psychology. George Miller very vividly describes the history of this technique. Sir Francis Galton, an English scientist and cousin of Charles Darwin, first tried an association experiment in 1879. He chose 75 words, wrote each of them on a separate card and did not touch them for several days. Then he took the cards one by one and looked at them. He kept time on a chronometer, starting from the moment when his eyes stopped on a word, and ending with the moment when the word he read caused him two different thoughts. He wrote down these thoughts for every word on the list, but declined to release the results. “They lay bare,” wrote Galton, “the essence of human thought with such amazing distinctness and certainty that it would hardly be possible to preserve if they were published and made public to the world.”

Currently, such a technique is known as the Kent-Rozanov free association technique (G.H. Kent, A.J. Rozanoff). It uses a set of 100 words as stimuli. Speech reactions to these words have been standardized on a large number of mentally healthy individuals, and the proportion of non-standard speech reactions (their ratio with standard ones) has been determined. These data allow us to determine the degree of eccentricity, unusual thinking of specific subjects.

associative field each person has his own both in terms of the composition of "names" and the strength of the connections between them. The actualization of one or another connection in the answer is not accidental and may even depend on the situation (20). Undoubtedly, the influence of a person's level of education on the structure of his mental lexicon. So , associative experiments on the material of the Russian and Estonian languages ​​revealed that people with a higher technical education more often give paradigmatic associations, and with a humanitarian education - syntagmatic ones.

(20) friend - bear

The nature of associations is affected by age, geographical conditions, and the profession of a person. According to A.A. Leontiev, different reactions the same stimulus was given by a resident of Yaroslavl (21) or Dushanbe (22), a conductor (23), a nurse (24) and a builder (25).

(21) brush- mountain ash

(22) brush - vine

brush - smooth, brush- soft

hand - amputation

brush - hair However, belonging to a certain people, one culture makes the "center" of the associative field as a whole quite stable, and the connections are regularly repeated in this language (26, 27, 28). According to the Tver psycholinguist A.A. Zalevskaya, associations also depend on the cultural and historical traditions of the people - Russian (29), Uzbek (30), French (31).

(26) poet - Pushkin

(27) number - three

friend- comrade, friend - enemy, friend- loyal

bread - salt

bread-tea

bread - wine.

The data obtained by comparing associations in a historical perspective are indicative. So, when associations were compared to the same stimuli, it turned out that the three most frequent reactions to the stimulus word in 1910 averaged about 46% of all responses, and in 1954 - already about 60% of all responses, those. the most frequent reactions became much more frequent. This means that as a result of standard education, the spread of television and other mass media, the stereotype of reactions has increased, people began to think more alike.

3. Method of semantic differential

Method semantic differential(semantic differential - from Greek semantikos - signifier and lat. differentia - difference) belongs to the methods of psycholinguistics and experimental psychosemantics. It serves to build subjective semantic spaces and refers to scaling methods. The latter are used in psychology in order to obtain quantitative indicators for assessing attitudes towards certain objects. In this case, both physical and social processes can act as an object. In psycholinguistics, words can act as objects of study. The semantic differential in psycholinguistics is a method of quantitative (and at the same time qualitative) indexing of the meaning of a word using bipolar scales, each of which has a gradation with a pair of antonymous adjectives.

The procedure for conducting an experiment using this technique is as follows. Test subjects a word is presented, and they must mark the number that corresponds to their idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe word. Each scale is marked with a gradation from +3 to -3 or just 7

Linguistic association experiment- used to assess the qualitative specifics of thinking. The test is also used for psychoanalytic purposes, for the study of higher nervous activity. When conducting a study, it is proposed to bring the first association that came to mind to the presented words.

The associative experiment is widely known and actively used in psycholinguistics, psychology, sociology, and psychiatry.

The emergence of the free word association method is associated with the name of Francis Galton (1822-1911). In 1879 he published the results of his associative experiments. Inviting the subject to respond to the stimulus word of the first that came to mind word association, Galton compiled lists of 75 words and opened them in turn to the subject (sometimes he himself acted as such). Using a stopwatch, he recorded the response time.

There are several types of associative experiment:

1. Free association experiment. Subjects are not given any restrictions on reactions.
2. Directed associative experiment. The subject is asked to give associations of a certain grammatical or semantic class (for example, choose an adjective for a noun).
3. Chain association experiment. The subjects are asked to respond to the stimulus with several associations - for example, give 10 reactions within 20 seconds.

Most researchers today tend to consider the associative experiment as a technique for studying the interests and attitudes of the individual. However, it should be noted that the interpretation of the results obtained is determined by the theoretical views of researchers. Therefore, the question of the validity of the methodology cannot be unambiguously resolved without correlation with the theoretical positions of its creators.

There are special dictionaries of associative norms, among the well-known ones is the dictionary of J. Deese. In Russian, the first dictionary of this kind was the Dictionary of Associative Norms of the Russian Language, ed. A.A. Leontiev.

Currently, the most complete dictionary in Russian is the "Russian Associative Dictionary" (compiled by: Yu.N. Karaulov, Yu.A. Sorokin, E.F. Tarasov, N.V. Ufimtseva, G.A. Cherkasova). It includes the following parts: v. 1. Direct dictionary: from stimulus to response; v. 2. Reverse dictionary: from response to stimulus; v. 3-6 are also direct and reverse dictionaries of the other two lists of words. This dictionary contains 1277 stimuli, which is slightly less than the number of words used by speakers in everyday speech (1500-3000); 12,600 different words were recorded as answers, and in total - more than a million reactions.

Experiment procedure. For a mass experiment, the subjects are collected in one room, instructed and motivated. After that, stimulus material is distributed in the form of questionnaires containing a list of stimulus words. Then the actual experiment takes place, during which the subjects for 10-15 minutes next to each stimulus word of the questionnaire write one word-reaction, which first came to the subject's head after reading the stimulus word. After that, questionnaires filled out by the subjects are collected. Usually each subject is given 100 words and 7-10 minutes for answers.

Possible word sets:

1st option: closet -, city -, matchmaker -, branch -, feather -, sparrow -, rabbit -, candle -, frame -, road -, dress -, ink -, shoes -, cat -, tomato -, thread -, notebook -, sun -, pillow -, day -, board -, street -, saw -, pencil -, glass -.

Option 2: bread -, lamp -, singing -, wheel -, beauty -, war -, air -, development -, bell -, cave -, infinity -, moon -, brother -, treatment -, ax -, fall -, deceit -, head -, doubt -, game -, goal -, depth -, people -, grass -, quarrel -, butterfly -, search -, sadness -, conscience -.

3. option: fire -, garden -, laughter -, forest -, red -, dress -, north -, love -, evening -, joy -, sleep -, bread -, business -, illness -, labor -, brother -, resentment -, thunderstorm -, husband -, spring -, table -, past -, honor -, space -, health -.

When analyzing the results of the study, the following are taken into account: the latent period (normally from 0.5 to 2 s), quality characteristics answers.

According to the quality of the answers, speech reactions are divided into:

- higher speech reactions(general-specific, individually-specific, abstract);

- primitive verbal reactions(indicative, consonant, refusal, extra-signal, interjection, persevering, echolalic);

- atactic reactions(corresponding to dissociated thinking).

Patients with schizophrenia are dominated by atactic (food - mole) or consonant (people - freak) reactions. This is due to the peculiarities of thinking disorders in this disease, consonance associations, etc.

Adequate performance of the study is considered if the highest speech reactions are 98-100%, among them general-specific - 68-72%, individual-specific - 8-12%, abstract - 20%, lower, atactic and verbose reactions are absent.

Interpretation of answers

When analyzing the answers of the associative experiment, syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations are distinguished, first of all. When classifying associations, one usually considers the relationships that arise in a stimulus-response pair. There are several methods of classification.

J. Miller classifies reactions in terms of identifying semantic features, or parameters:

1. contrast (male - female),
2. similarity (fast - fast),
3. submission (animal - dog),
4. subordination (dog - cat),
5. generalization (cucumber - vegetable),
6. assonance (mouth - mole),
7. part - whole (day - week),
8. addition (forward - march), etc.

Charles Osgood distinguishes associations by consonance and meaning, while noting that it is semantic features that should be decisive. A.P. Klimenko adheres to the same point of view. It distinguishes the following types of associations:

1. phonetic, in which there is a consonance between the stimulus and the reaction, but the semantic justification of the association is not expressed (or very weakly expressed) (day - shadow, flax - maple);
2. word-building, based on the unity of the root of the stimulus and reaction, but not reflecting the semantic relationships between stimuli and reaction that are clear and uniform for different words (yellow - jaundice, yellow - bile);
3. paradigmatic associations that differ from the stimulus in no more than one way semantic feature(table - chair, high - low, get - buy);
4. syntagmatic associations that, together with the stimulus, make up a subordinating combination (the sky is blue, the woman is beautiful, get a ticket, tall is a man);
5. thematic (salt - earth, dark - night);
6. quotation (old man - sea, white - steamer, uncle - Styopa);
7. grammatical (table - table, run - run).

Kent-Rozanov free association technique

Currently, such a technique is known as the Kent-Rozanov free association technique. It uses a set of 100 words as stimuli. Speech reactions to these words have been standardized on a large number of mentally healthy individuals, and the proportion of non-standard speech reactions (their ratio with standard ones) has been determined. These data allow us to determine the degree of eccentricity, unusual thinking of specific subjects.

And his followers assumed that uncontrolled associations are a symbolic or sometimes even a direct projection of the inner, often unconscious content of consciousness.

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association experiment

Catatonia: Echolalia and association experiment

Subtitles

History

Experiment procedure

For a mass experiment, the subjects are collected in one room, instructed and motivated. After that, stimulus material is distributed in the form of questionnaires containing a list of stimulus words. Then the actual experiment takes place, during which the subjects for 10-15 minutes next to each stimulus word of the questionnaire write one word-reaction, which first came to the subject's head after reading the stimulus word. After that, questionnaires filled out by the subjects are collected. Usually each subject is given 100 words and 7-10 minutes for answers. Often the experimenter dictates stimuli.

Instruction for the subject

Now you will receive a list of words, you will have to read word by word sequentially and write next to each word the first word that comes to your mind. At the same time, you must write extremely quickly, without hesitation, the speed of your reactions is prerequisite work in the experiment.

Varieties

1. Free association experiment.
2. Directed associative experiment.
3. Chain association experiment.

Interpretation of answers

When analyzing the answers of the associative experiment, syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations are distinguished, first of all. When classifying associations, one usually considers the relationships that arise in a stimulus-response pair. There are several methods of classification.

J. Miller classifies reactions in terms of identifying semantic features, or parameters:

1. contrast (male - female),
2. similarity (fast - fast),
3. submission (animal - dog),
4. subordination (dog - cat),
5. generalization (cucumber - vegetable),
6. assonance (mouth - mole),
7. part - whole (day - week),
8. addition (forward - march), etc.

Charles Osgood distinguishes associations by consonance and by meaning, while noting that it is semantic features that should be decisive. A.P. Klimenko adheres to the same point of view. It distinguishes the following types of associations:

1. phonetic, in which there is a consonance between the stimulus and the reaction, but the semantic justification of the association is not expressed (or very weakly expressed) (day - shadow, flax - maple);
2. word-building, based on the unity of the root of the stimulus and reaction, but not reflecting the semantic relationships between stimuli and reaction that are clear and uniform for different words (yellow - jaundice, yellow - bile);
3. paradigmatic associations that differ from the stimulus in no more than one semantic feature (table - chair, high - low, get - buy);
4. syntagmatic associations that, together with the stimulus, make up a subordinating combination (the sky is blue, the woman is beautiful, get a ticket, tall is a man);
5. thematic (salt - earth, dark - night);
6. quotation (old man - sea, white - steamer, uncle - Styopa);
7. grammatical (table - table, run - run).