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a field of linguistics that studies language primarily as a mental phenomenon. From the point of view of psycholinguistics, language exists to the extent that the inner world of the speaker and the listener, the writer and the reader exists. Therefore, psycholinguistics does not study “dead” languages, such as Old Church Slavonic or Greek, where only texts are available to us, but not the mental worlds of their creators.

Psycholinguistics should not be seen as part linguistics and part psychology. This is a complex science that belongs to linguistic disciplines, since it studies language, and to psychological disciplines, since it studies it in a certain aspect as a mental phenomenon. And since language is a sign system that serves society, psycholinguistics is also included in the range of disciplines that study social communications, including the design and transmission of knowledge.

A person is born endowed with the ability to fully master a language. However, this opportunity has yet to be realized. To understand exactly how this happens, psycholinguistics studies the development of a child’s speech. Psycholinguistics also explores the reasons why the process of speech development and its functioning deviate from the norm. Following the principle “what is hidden in the norm is obvious in pathology,” psycholinguistics studies speech defects in children and adults. These are defects that arise on early stages life in the process of acquiring speech, as well as defects resulting from later anomalies such as brain injuries, hearing loss, mental illness

. Here are the questions that traditionally occupy the minds of psycholinguists:

1. Is the process of recognition of sound speech and the process of its generation symmetrical?

2. How do the mechanisms of mastering a native language differ from the mechanisms of mastering a foreign language?

3. What mechanisms ensure the reading process?

4. Why do certain speech defects occur with certain brain lesions?

5. What information about a speaker’s personality can be obtained by studying certain aspects of his speech behavior?

It is generally accepted that psycholinguistics originated about 40 years ago in the USA. Indeed, the very term “psycholinguistics” was proposed by American psychologists in the late 1950s with the aim of giving formal status to a scientific direction that had already developed in the USA. Nevertheless, psycholinguistics has not yet become a science with clearly defined boundaries, so it is hardly possible to indicate with certainty what aspects of language and speech this science studies and what methods it uses for this purpose. Confirmation of what has been said is the content of any textbook on psycholinguistics. Unlike a textbook on linguistics, which will certainly talk about phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, etc., or a textbook on psychology, which will certainly cover problems of perception, memory and emotions, the content teaching aid in psycholinguistics is decisively determined by the scientific and cultural tradition in which the textbook is written.

For the majority of American and English-speaking psycholinguists (usually psychologists by education), the most influential linguistic theory in the United States, N. Chomsky’s generative grammar in its various variants, usually serves as the reference science about language. Accordingly, psycholinguistics in the American tradition focuses on attempts to test the extent to which psychological hypotheses based on Chomsky's ideas correspond to observed speech behavior. From these positions, some authors consider the child’s speech, others consider the role of language in social interactions, third the relationship between language and cognitive processes. French psycholinguists, as a rule, are followers of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Therefore, their primary area of ​​interest is the process of speech formation in a child and the role of language in the development of intelligence and cognitive processes.

From the perspective of the European (including domestic) humanitarian tradition, we can characterize the sphere of interests of psycholinguistics by first describing an approach that is obviously alien to the study of the psyche. This is the understanding of language as a “system of pure relations” (

langue in the terms of the founder of structural linguistics, a Swiss linguist of the early 20th century. F. de Saussure), where language acts as a construct, alienated from the psyche of the speaker for research purposes. Psycholinguistics, on the other hand, is initially focused on the study of the real processes of speaking and understanding, on “man in language” (an expression by the French linguist E. Benveniste, 1902-1976).

It seems productive to consider psycholinguistics not as a science with its own subject and methods, but as a special perspective in which language, speech, communication and cognitive processes. This perspective has given rise to many research programs, heterogeneous in goals, theoretical premises and methods. Three groups of factors are common to these programs.

1. Dissatisfaction with purely cybernetic, functional models of speech activity. Functional models make it possible to study speech using the “black box” method, when the researcher draws conclusions only by comparing data at the “input” and data at the “output”, thereby refusing to raise the question of what is “really” happening.

2. A change in value orientations generated by this dissatisfaction. In accordance with new value orientations, research interest is aimed primarily at understanding the real (although not directly observable) processes occurring in the psyche of the speaker and the listener.

3. Attention to research methods, among which absolute preference is given to experiment, as well as carefully planned observation of the processes of generation and education of speech in real time.

It can be considered that the psycholinguistic perspective of the study of language and speech actually existed long before a group of American scientists coined the term “psycholinguistics.” So, back in the 19th century. German philosopher and linguist W. von Humboldt attributed to language vital role in the “worldview”, or, as we would put it today, in the subject’s structuring of information coming from the external environment. A similar approach is found in the works of the 19th century Russian philologist. A.A. Potebnya, including in his teaching about the “internal form” of the word. This concept itself acquires content only under the condition of its psychological interpretation. The feeling of the internal form of a word assumes that the individual is able to realize the connection between the sound of the word and its meaning: if the native speaker does not see behind the word tailor word ports, then the internal form of the word tailor lost.

The domestic tradition of a psycholinguistic approach to the phenomenon of language dates back to I.A. Baudouin-de-Courtenay (1845-1929), a Russian and Polish linguist, the founder of the Kazan school of linguistics. It was Baudouin who spoke of language as a “psycho-social essence”, and proposed linguistics to be included among the “psychological-sociological” sciences. Studying the sound organization of language, Baudouin called the minimal unit of language, the phoneme, “representation of sound,” since the meaningful function of the phoneme is carried out in the process of certain mental acts. Baudouin's students V.A. Bogoroditsky (1857-1941) and L.V. Shcherba (1880-1944) regularly used experimental methods to study speech activity. Of course, Shcherba did not talk about

psycholinguistics, especially since this term was established in Russian linguistics only after the appearance of A. A. Leontiev’s monograph with the same name (1967). However, it was in the famous article by Shcherba On the threefold linguistic aspect of linguistic phenomena in an experiment in linguistics(reported orally back in 1927) already contains ideas central to modern psycholinguistics: an emphasis on the study of the real processes of speaking and listening; understanding alive colloquial speech as a special system; the study of “negative linguistic material” (a term introduced by Shcherba for statements marked “they don’t say that”) and, finally, the special place given by Shcherba to linguistic experiment.

The culture of linguistic experiment, which Shcherba valued so much, found its fruitful embodiment in the works of the Leningrad phonological school he founded - these are the works of L.V. Shcherba’s direct student L.R. Zinder (1910-1995) and Zinder’s collaborators linguists of the next generation (L. V. Bondarko and others).

And yet the main paths of linguistics of the 20th century. and its successes were associated not with the interpretation of language as a phenomenon of the psyche, but with its understanding as a sign system. Therefore, the psycholinguistic perspective and many of the research programs that embody it for a long time occupied marginal positions in relation to such aspirations of linguistics as the structural approach. True, upon closer examination, the analysis of language, characteristic of structural linguistics, only as a sign system in complete isolation from the inner world of its speakers turns out to be nothing more than a scientific abstraction. After all, this analysis is limited to the procedures of division and identification carried out by the researcher, who for this purpose observes his own psyche and speech behavior other individuals. But it is precisely because of the diversity and diversity of natural language that we can abstract from language as a phenomenon of the psyche.

We are given living speech and written texts as a real object. But as a subject of study we are always dealing with some research constructs. Any such design presupposes (sometimes implicitly) theoretical assumptions about what aspects and phenomena are considered important, valuable to study, and what methods are considered adequate to achieve the goals of the study. Neither value orientations nor methodology arise out of nowhere. This applies to an even greater extent to research programs, which, at any level of novelty, inevitably follow the general scientific principle of continuity.

Psycholinguistics research programs are largely determined by which scientific directions in a given period turned out to be reference or related not only for linguistics and psychology, but also for the humanities in general. It is important that the relations of “standard” and “contiguity” make sense only if they are clearly tied to a specific historical period: the corresponding relations and assessments change depending on what the overall map of science and the style of scientific knowledge are in a given time period. For psychology during the period of its formation, the standard of science was physics with its pathos of experimental research, due to which all spiritual phenomenology, not amenable to experimental analysis, was given over to philosophy. For structural linguistics, which valued rigor and formalization of presentation above all else, mathematics and mathematical logic were considered the standard. In turn, for psycholinguistics until the mid-1970s, it was experimental psychology (as it had developed by the mid-20th century) that remained the unconditional standard and the closest related science. At the same time, psycholinguistics itself (at least in its European version) was considered a branch of linguistics, and not psychology (although in fact not everyone agrees with this).

The fact that the task of studying language as a phenomenon of the psyche of a speaking individual takes the researcher into an area of ​​a fundamentally different nature than the physical cosmos was realized quite late. Reflection on the fact that the sphere of the “living” cosmos is incomparably more complex than the physical cosmos, and mental processes are inseparable from spiritual phenomenology, was the lot of a few, and never gained much popularity in the linguistic environment. Hence the gap between psycholinguistic theories aimed at describing how we speak and understand speech, and the necessarily simplified attempts to experimentally verify these theories. Such a gap is especially characteristic of American psycholinguistics with its constant desire to find experimental analogues for the basic concepts of N. Chomsky’s formal theories, which, in the words of Chomsky himself, “would be tempting, but completely absurd.”

Nevertheless, since the late 1970s, the problem field of psycholinguistics has developed under the influence of the state of affairs both within linguistics and in the sciences that over time have become related to linguistics, and thus to psycholinguistics. This is, first of all, a complex of sciences about knowledge as such and about the nature and dynamics of cognitive processes. Natural language is the main form in which our knowledge about the world is reflected, but it is also the main tool with the help of which a person acquires and generalizes his knowledge, records it and transmits it to society.

Any, including everyday, knowledge (as opposed to skills) requires linguistic design. On this path, the interests of psycholinguistics are intertwined with the tasks of cognitive psychology and developmental psychology.

Language is the most important tool for the socialization of an individual. It is the full mastery of the language that ensures the inclusion of an individual in one or another layer of the sociocultural space. Thus, if in the process of child development, mastery of the native language turns out to be inhibited for some reason (early childhood autism, deafness, organic lesions brain), this inevitably affects not only the development of intelligence, but also limits the possibility of building normal relationships “I others.”

Globalization of world cultural processes, mass migrations and expansion of areas of regular interpenetration of different languages ​​and cultures (multiculturalism), the emergence of global computer networks - these factors have given special weight to research into the processes and mechanisms of mastering a foreign language.

All of the above points have significantly expanded the understanding of areas of knowledge whose research interests intersect with psycholinguistics.

SOME RESEARCH PROGRAMS IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS Programs for studying child speech development. Attention to the child’s speech is traditional for psycholinguistics of any orientation. The predominant approach is a purely phenomenological approach: either the speech development of one child is described (all levels of language are covered if possible), or particular phenomena characteristic of the speech of most children at some stage of development are studied. Thus, researchers have always been fascinated by children’s first “words.” It turned out that they are not words in the usual sense, since they simultaneously correspond with different persons, objects and situations surrounding the child. Numerous sound complexes like the children's “give” act not as words, but as integral statements, which are contextually determined: behind the same sound complex there can be meaning"I'm hungry" I need your attention", " I want to touch this item" etc.

Much attention is paid to the study of children's neologisms in the field of word formation, since this reveals an important dynamic component of speech generation. Of interest is the process of a child mastering the system of pronouns and, above all, correct use first person pronouns. The problem of narration in a child has become a separate task, i.e. difficulties specific to children of a certain age in constructing a coherent text. A special place in the study of child speech belongs to the study of the role of language as a sign system, which serves as the most effective support when performing any logical operations.

Studying categorization processes: research programs of J. Bruner and E. Roche. Since the 1970s, the center of discussions about the role of language in the development of the conceptual apparatus and cognitive processes has been the problem of the functioning of words that name classes and categories rather than individual entities. This was facilitated by the popularity of the works of the American psychologist Eleanor Rosch on the structure of generalizing categories such as “birds”, “furniture”, “vegetables”. Generalization (categorization) is one of the most fundamental mental operations. Therefore, the very problem of generalization and categorization has existed in science since the time of Aristotle and was interpreted depending on certain specific tasks as philosophical and logical, as well as psychological and psychophysiological. The formation of a child’s ability to generalize has always been considered the most important task for those who have studied the psychology of development and learning.

Rosch was the first to propose abandoning the consideration of the totality of category members as a set of equal objects covered by a generalizing name. In the human sciences, it was the equality of category members that was considered self-evident and was not disputed by anyone. Roche tried to show that this tradition does not correspond to psychological reality and presented the category as a structure on which the relationship between the center and the periphery is defined. Center these are typical representatives of this category; the further from the center, the less typical. The pathos of Roche and her followers in describing the culturally dependent features of psychological and linguistic structures, according to which in one culture, when talking about fruit, they imagine first of all an apple or a pear, in others an orange or a banana. Thanks to Roche’s work, the complexity of relationships like “furniture table” once again became clear. Back in the 1930s, the Soviet psychologist L.S. Vygotsky (1886–1934) wrote that a child’s use of words furniture cannot serve as evidence that the child has mastered the process of generalization in its entirety. Long before Roche, the American psychologist J. Bruner and his school also dealt with similar problems. In the late 1950s it was shown that the development cognitive activity the child’s understanding depends on how successfully the child uses words as signs that generalize and replace individual real objects. In the 1990s, Bruner emphasized that sign mediation is formed not in the laboratory, but in the context of social life, where the creation of meaning is determined by culture, not nature. (see also COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS).

Conversation learning programs. From the standpoint of understanding the real processes of speaking and listening, the program of study of spoken speech proposed in the 1960s by the outstanding modern Russian linguist M.V. Panov and then implemented by a team led by E.A. Zemskaya is of greatest interest. For the first time, a view was formulated on colloquial speech as a special system that exists in parallel with the system of a codified literary language. At each level of the colloquial speech system, be it phonetics, morphology or syntax, there are regularities that are characteristic of colloquial speech. In the very general view The peculiarities of colloquial speech are related to the fact that a significant part of the information is contained not in the text of the utterance itself, but in the communication situation taken as a whole (the so-called constituency of colloquial speech). Accordingly, the speaker (unconsciously) is guided by the fact that the listener will easily be able to extract the information he needs, since the multi-layered context of the communication situation is equally accessible to him. These are facial expressions and gestures of the participants in communication, time and place of action, speech etiquette, accepted in a given environment, etc.

This approach allows us to study from a new angle not only conversational speech and communication strategies, but also a number of other important problems. One of them is the problem of speech errors. The concept of error is meaningful only in comparison with the concept of norm. The presence in the modern Russian language of two functional systems colloquial speech and a codified literary language entails the idea of ​​the presence of two different norms in it and, as a consequence, clarification of which particular norm is violated behind this or that error. grammatically correct statements, following the standards codified literary language, turn out to be pretentious and unnatural if they are automatically transferred to a situation of oral communication (see also DISCOURSE).

Sign language learning programs for the deaf. The theory of the parallel functioning of two systems spoken speech and the system of codified literary language turned out to be very fruitful for understanding the functioning of the sign language of deaf individuals (see also SIGN LANGUAGE(S). In Russia, this was shown by defectologist L.G. Zaitseva, who relied on the research of E.A. Zemskaya and her colleagues.

Sign language of the deaf is the “native” language of congenitally deaf or prematurely deafened individuals. A deaf child develops sign language as an instrument of everyday communication only if he either grows up in a family of deaf parents or gets into a group of deaf people early enough. It is the mastery of spoken sign language that serves as a condition for mental development and social adaptation deaf child.

In its function, sign language, with the help of which deaf people communicate with each other in informal situations, is similar to spoken speech. At the same time, gestural spoken language is not a kinetic copy of ordinary spoken language, but a special symbolic system in which there are communicative universals, but also its own specifics. The latter is largely due to the material form of existence of sign language, since a gesture is realized in space, can be performed with either one or two hands, moreover, at different tempos, and in addition, it is always accompanied by facial expressions. Like ordinary spoken speech, the sign language of the deaf is fundamentally constitutive.

In parallel with spoken sign language, tracing sign language functions in the deaf community, which is largely a kinetic copy of the Russian literary language. It is the tracing sign language that is used by the sign interpreter of television news; educated deaf people also use tracing sign language in official speaking situations.

The comparative study of the grammar and semantics of ordinary spoken and signed spoken language as systems opposed to the codified literary language turns out to be productive. Colloquial speech (including sign language) is characterized by two opposing trends: dismemberment and compression, syncretism. For example, meanings that are expressed by one lexeme in a codified literary language turn out to be dismembered in colloquial speech: instead of pen they often say what to write. In colloquial sign language, the analogy is the nominative model by type

[berry] + [black] + [tongue] for token blueberry . Syncretism in Russian colloquial speech manifests itself, in particular, in specific non-union free compounds of the type I'm going to the hospital with a toothache, in merging into one whole two phrases like she lived somewhere near Moscow, it was her village. In spoken spoken speech we also have the free combination of gestures into complex structures, where connections between members are reconstructed from the situation. In colloquial speech, words with a “referential” meaning like thing , thing , case, replacing any lexeme. In sign speech, a typical manifestation of syncretism is the presence of one gesture to express the agent, action and result of the action, where possible ambiguity is removed due to constituency.

The study of the sign language of the deaf as a means of communication confirms that any communication system provides adequate transmission of meanings necessary for the functioning of the culture of a given society.

Programs for studying language knowledge and knowledge about language (“mental thesaurus” and relationships within it). Back at the beginning of the 20th century. It was experimentally established that there is a commonality of word associations among people speaking a given language. Later it became obvious that the generality of associations can significantly depend on the subculture to which people belong, although they speak the same language. For example, if in an experiment native speakers of modern Russian are presented with words like lemon , rain , rose , light , run with instructions to answer them with the first word that comes to mind, then most informants will give the words as association answers sour , strong , flower , lamp , quickly, etc. If, in a similar experiment, we present words that describe social and spiritual realities, such as, for example, homeland , faith , ideal, soul, then the associations will most likely be different; in particular, the answers will depend on age, education, and membership in a particular social group.

Nevertheless, on average, associative connections are quite stable. They are recorded in associative dictionaries and tables of “associative norms”; the latter reflect the most private associations, typical (within a specified time or sociocultural framework) for speakers of a given language.

Associative stable connections between words and phrases that exist in our psyche form experimentally reproducible chains, which are sometimes called a “mental thesaurus.” These connections are diverse, and their presence in relation to the native language is not recognized. Difficulties that arise when studying native language, to a large extent, are precisely due to the fact that the corresponding connections have to be created, and they, as a rule, conflict with the “mental thesaurus” of the native language. This is most clearly visible in vocabulary at the level of word compatibility (cf. Russian. heavy rain and English

heavy rain ) and in grammar at the level of unconsciously acquired childhood models of word formation and control (a kind of “mental grammar”).

In addition to proficiency in our native language, which, strictly speaking, belongs not so much to the sphere of knowledge as to the sphere of skills, we, as it turns out, have very non-trivial, although unconscious, knowledge about the language itself. Thus, it was shown (on Russian material by Frumkina, in English by Underwood and Schultz) that a person can with great accuracy arrange the letters of the alphabet of his native language by frequency, and place a large group of words on the scale frequent rare. It is even more surprising that our psyche reflects the properties of not only words, but also meaningless letter combinations, for example, trigrams such as UPR or OVA. In particular, for a native language, a person can with great reliability estimate the relative frequencies of occurrence of trigrams in a text, their difficulty in pronouncing, the degree of their connection with full-meaning words of the language (the so-called “generative force”).

The opportunity in an experiment to obtain estimates of the above parameters from native informants is important in two aspects: 1) from the point of view of our knowledge about the structure and laws of functioning of the language system; 2) from the point of view of possible applications, where knowledge about the language is used to solve practical problems. As an example (2) we indicate wide range problems associated with language learning for persons with congenital or acquired hearing and speech defects. It is obvious that it is more effective to teach speech (or restore speech) based on the most frequent elements, on the strongest interword connections, on phonetic fragments, which on average present less difficulty in pronunciation.

Program by A. Vezhbitskaya. In the 1970s and 1980s, Polish and Australian researcher Anna Wierzbicka(I) developed a “language of semantic primitives” universal dictionary basic words, which allows you to describe and compare the meanings of words, grammatical elements and phrases in different languages ​​from the position of the speaker and the individual who perceives the speech. From Wierzbicka’s point of view, there is nothing random in language; any element of an utterance is significant because it realizes certain communicative intentions of the speaker and correlates with the listener’s attitudes. Wierzbicka pays special attention to identifying the similarities and differences of similar meanings in different languages ​​as reflecting certain culturally dependent forms of “worldview”. For example, with the help of descriptions using only the language of primitives, Wierzbicka showed culturally determined differences in the interpretation of many concepts that we tend to consider “universal” and therefore supposedly have the same meaning for everyone. These are concepts such as"friend", "homeland", "fate", "love" . Therefore, we can consider that Wierzbicka developed and applied the method of comparative psycholinguistics in her works.

Vezhbitskaya primarily uses the method of introspection, consistently revealing to the reader her reflection as a researcher and explaining the motives for her conclusions. Although Vezhbitskaya does not associate her works with psycholinguistic programs, it is she who is credited with implementing E. Benveniste’s desire to describe “man in language” on specific linguistic material. (see also ETHNOLINGUISTICS; SEMANTICS)

RESEARCH PROCEDURES IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS: EXPERIMENT, OBSERVATION, INTROSPECTIVENESS The specificity of psycholinguistics, understood as a set of scientific programs, is largely determined by the systematic use of experimental methods in it. In the human sciences, experiment is only one of the ways to obtain knowledge; in linguistics it occupies a very modest place, inferior to observation and introspection. On the contrary, in psycholinguistics, for which modern experimental psychology remains the standard, experiment is considered the dominant method. However, due to the particular complexity of natural language as a subject of research, the criteria for which procedures should be considered an experiment and which should be considered an observation remain vague. This is partly because a canon has not been identified that prescribes a generally accepted way for linguists and psycholinguists to move from “pre-knowledge” to a clear formulation of the problem.

A scientist who studies language as a phenomenon of the psyche always begins research with introspection mentally trying out an experiment on himself, combining at this stage the researcher and the informant in one person. The reflection of a scientist in this situation should lead to an understanding of the alternative: we can either study introspectively our own language, since our inner world is given to us directly, or study the speech behavior of other people, since only in this way can we reconstruct the unobservable phenomena of someone else’s psyche and, accordingly, the language of another person.

If we take into account that psycholinguistics mainly borrowed its methods from experimental psychology, then it arises new problem: To what extent are these methods suitable for studying such a complex object as natural language? An instructive example is the use of a technique for recording eye movements during the reading process. It was assumed that if eye movements could be recorded with great accuracy, this would shed light on the mechanisms of text comprehension when reading. In fact, it was the subtlety of the technique, which allows one to determine the gaze fixation current with letter accuracy, that revealed the inadequacy of the approach. It is known that the eye transmits information to the brain only during the period of gaze fixation, but not during movement from one point of fixation to another. This means that the eye should spend the longest time in the most informative places in the text. Regardless of any opinions about where exactly these places are located in the text, it is clear that the informative points are unlikely to coincide with a space or with the space between two letters in the middle of a word. And the points of gaze fixation were very often recorded there.

LITERATURE Leontyev A.A. Psycholinguistics. M., 1967
Fundamentals of the theory of speech activity. M., 1974
Shcherba L.V. About the threefold aspect linguistic phenomena and about an experiment in linguistics. In the book: Language system and speech activity. L., 1974
Frumkina R.M. The relationship between precise methods and the humanitarian approach: linguistics, psychology, psycholinguistics. News of the Department of Literature and Language of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1978, vol. 37, no. 4
Frumkina R.M. On the specificity of hypotheses in psycholinguistics. In the collection: Hypothesis in modern linguistics. M., 1980
Psycholinguistics. M., 1984
Semantics and categorization. M., 1991

Globalization of world cultural processes, mass migrations and expansion of areas of regular interpenetration of different languages ​​and cultures ( intercultural communication), the emergence of the global computer network Internet began to promote people's interest in the study of processes and mechanisms mastering a foreign language.

A new science bordering linguistics — psycholinguistics formed in the 50s of the XX century.
It arose in connection with the need to give theoretical understanding to a number of practical problems, for the solution of which a purely linguistic approach, associated primarily with text analysis, and not talking man, turned out to be insufficient. For example, in teaching native language, and especially foreign language; in the field of speech education for preschool children and speech therapy; in problems of speech influence (especially in propaganda and media activities); in forensic psychology and criminology. In addition, psycholinguistics is needed, for example, to recognize people by the characteristics of their speech, to solve problems of machine translation, speech input of information into a computer and, accordingly, this science is closely related to computer science.
It was these applied tasks that served as a direct impetus for the emergence of psycholinguistics and its separation into an independent scientific field.

Psycholinguistics as a science

Psycholinguistics is a complex science that relates to linguistic disciplines, since it studies language, and to psychological disciplines, since it studies it in a certain aspect - as a mental phenomenon. And since language is a sign system serving society, then psycholinguistics It is also included in the range of disciplines that study social communications, including the design and transfer of knowledge.

Object of psycholinguistics in its various schools and directions is defined differently. But almost all definitions present such characteristics as procedurality, subject, object and addressee of speech, purpose, motive or need, content of verbal communication, language means.
Let us dwell on the definition of the object of psycholinguistics given by A.A. Leontyev:
« Object psycholinguistics... is always a set of speech events or speech situations" [Leontyev, 1999, 16].
This object of psycholinguistics coincides with the object of linguistics and other related “speech” sciences.

« Subject psycholinguistics is the relationship of personality with the structure and functions of speech activity, on the one hand, and language as the main “formative” of a person’s image of the world, on the other” [Leontyev, 1999, 19].

Methods of psycholinguistics.

Your methods psycholinguistics primarily inherited from psychology. First of all, these are experimental methods. In addition, psycholinguistics often uses the method of observation and introspection. The method of linguistic experiment “came” from general linguistics to psycholinguistics.

Experiment, Traditionally considered the most objective research method, it has its own specifics in psycholinguistics. In psycholinguistics, the share of direct experimental methods (when recorded changes directly reflect the phenomenon under study) is small. But so-called indirect methods are common, where conclusions are drawn indirectly, which reduces the effectiveness of the experiment.

Of the “direct” methods, the most commonly used method is “semantic scaling”, in which the subject must place a certain object on a graduated scale, guided by his own ideas.

In addition, a variety of associative techniques are widely used in psycholinguistics.
When using both direct and indirect methods, the problem of interpreting the result arises. The most reliable results are obtained by using a combination or “battery” of techniques aimed at studying the same phenomenon. So, for example, L.V. Sakharny recommends “...using different experimental techniques and then comparing the data obtained” [Sakharny, 1989, 89].

Linguistic experiment, also used in psycholinguistics, was developed by L.V. Shcherba. To distinguish between linguistic and psycholinguistic experiments, it is necessary to determine which model is being tested. If this is a model of a language standard, then the experiment is linguistic. If the reliability of the model is verified experimentally language ability or speech activity, then this is a psycholinguistic experiment.

Different from those described above formative experiment, in which not the functioning of a certain language ability is studied, but its formation.
It is noteworthy that there is some gap between psycholinguistic theories aimed at describing how we speak and understand speech, and the necessarily simplified attempts to experimentally test these theories, because a living language always turns out to be immeasurably more complex and does not fit into any strict universal framework.

The essence of psycholinguistics.

Thus, psycholinguistics is the science of the patterns of generation and perception of speech utterances. It studies the processes of speech production, as well as the perception and formation of speech in their correlation with the language system. Psycholinguistics is close to linguistics in its subject matter, and closer to psychology in its research methods.

Psycholinguistics As a field of linguistics, language is studied primarily as a phenomenon of the psyche. From the point of view of psycholinguistics, language exists to the extent that the inner world of the speaker and the listener, the writer and the reader exists. Therefore, psycholinguistics does not study “dead” languages, such as Old Church Slavonic or Greek, where only texts are available to us, but not the mental worlds of their creators.

In recent years, a point of view has become widespread according to which researchers consider it productive to consider psycholinguistics not as a science with its own subject and methods, but as a special perspective in which language, speech, communication and cognitive processes are studied. This perspective has given rise to many research programs, heterogeneous in goals, theoretical premises and methods. These programs are primarily of an applied nature.

History of the emergence and development of psycholinguistics.

Actually, the term “psycholinguistics” has come into scientific use since 1954, after the book of the same name was published in the USA teamwork edited by C.E. Osgood and T.A. Sebeoka. But ideas close to the problems of psycholinguistics arose and developed much earlier. It can be considered that the psycholinguistic perspective of the study of language and speech actually existed long before a group of American scientists coined the term “psycholinguistics.”

Forerunner psycholinguistics A.A. Leontyev calls German philosopher and the linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, since it was to him that “the idea of ​​speech activity and the understanding of language as a connecting link between society (“the public”) and man belongs” [Leontyev, 1999, 26].
So, back in the 19th century. W. von Humboldt attributed the most important role to language in the “worldview”, i.e. in the subject’s structuring of information coming from the external environment. A similar approach is found in the works of the 19th century Russian philologist. A.A. Potebnya, including in his teaching about the “internal form” of the word. This concept itself acquires content only under the condition of its psychological interpretation.

The domestic tradition of the psycholinguistic approach to the phenomenon of language goes back to I.A. Baudouin-de-Courtenay (1845–1929), Russian and Polish linguist, founder of the Kazan school of linguistics. It was Baudouin who spoke of language as a “psycho-social essence”, and proposed linguistics to be included among the “psychological-sociological” sciences.

Baudouin’s students, V.A. Bogoroditsky and L.V. Shcherba, regularly used experimental methods to study speech activity. Of course, Shcherba did not talk about psycholinguistics, because this term was established in Russian linguistics only after the appearance of A. A. Leontiev’s monograph with the same name in 1967. However, it was in Shcherba’s famous article “ On the threefold aspect of linguistic phenomena and on experiment in linguistics" ideas central to modern psycholinguistics are already contained: an emphasis on the study of the real processes of speaking and listening; understanding of living spoken speech as a special system and, finally, the special place given by Shcherba to linguistic experiment.
IN Soviet Russia development itself psycholinguistics began in the mid-60s of the twentieth century, primarily at the Institute of Linguistics of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Moscow), work was also carried out in institutes in other cities of the country.
Every 2-3 years all-Union symposia on psycholinguistics. Soviet psycholinguistics relied on the materialistic psychology of L.S. Vygotsky’s school (primarily on the concept of activity) and on the linguistic heritage of L.V. Shcherba and his school, especially on his interpretation of active grammar.

Considering psycholinguistics as one of the subsidiary areas developed by A.N. Leontyev psychological theory activity, the Moscow psycholinguistic school for a long time called psycholinguistics “theory of speech activity”, using in parallel the term “psycholinguistics”.
Since the late 1970s, the problem field psycholinguistics developed under the influence of the state of affairs both within linguistics and in the sciences that over time became for linguistics - and thereby for psycholinguistics– adjacent. This is, first of all, a complex of sciences about knowledge as such and about the nature and dynamics of cognitive processes.

For the majority of American and English-speaking psycholinguists (usually psychologists by education), the most influential linguistic theory in the United States, N. Chomsky’s generative grammar in its various variants, usually serves as the reference science about language. Accordingly, psycholinguistics in the American tradition focuses on attempts to test the extent to which psychological hypotheses based on Chomsky's ideas correspond to observed speech behavior. From these positions, some authors consider the child’s speech, others consider the role of language in social interactions, and still others consider the relationship between language and cognitive processes.

French psycholinguists tend to be followers of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Therefore, their primary area of ​​interest is the process of speech formation in a child and the role of language in the development of intelligence and cognitive processes.
Having developed on the basis various directions Psychological linguistics, psycholinguistics adopted his interest in man as a native speaker and the desire to consider language as a dynamic system of speech activity (speech behavior) of a person.

Psycholinguistics and linguistics

Linguistics(linguistics) is traditionally understood as the science of language as a means of communication. However, its subject, as a rule, is not clearly defined. It is obvious that the object of linguistics is speech activity (speech acts, speech reactions). But the linguist highlights in it that general, what is in the organization of any speech of any person in any situation, those means without which it is generally impossible to characterize internal structure speech flow. The subject of linguistics is language system, used in speech communication (communication).
As mentioned above, in its subject matter, psycholinguistics is extremely close to linguistics (linguistics).

The main trends in the development of modern linguistics are quite comparable with the trends in the development of psycholinguistics and boil down to the following.
Firstly, the very understanding of language has changed. If earlier the linguistic means themselves (phonetic, grammatical, lexical) were at the center of the linguist’s interests, now it is clearly realized that all these linguistic means are only formal operators with the help of which a person carries out the process of communication. But this very concept of meaning goes beyond communication - it is also the main cognitive (cognitive) unit that forms a person’s image of the world and, as such, is part of various kinds of cognitive schemes, standard images of typical cognitive situations, etc. Thus, meaning, which used to be one of many concepts of linguistics, is increasingly turning into its main, key concept.

Accordingly, psycholinguistics is increasingly turning into “psychosemantics” in the broad sense of the word.
Secondly, linguistics in recent decades has paid increasing attention to studytext.
And psycholinguistics is increasingly interested in texts, their specific structure, variation, and functional specialization.

Thus, it is obvious that psycholinguistics has the most close ties with general linguistics (general linguistics). In addition, she constantly interacts with sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics and applied linguistics, and in recent years especially with computational linguistics.
The extreme closeness of psycholinguistics and linguistics creates the problem of distinguishing between psycholinguistic and linguistic units. A linguistic unit is “an element of scientific and theoretical construction or linguistic modeling” [Akhmanova, 1966, 146]. Linguistic units are primarily invariants various models descriptions of language, they relate to language, language standard, norm.
Psycholinguistic units are “speech actions and operations that are in hierarchical relationships with each other” [Leontyev, 1999, 56]. Psycholinguistic units are correlated with speech activity.

In addition, psycholinguistics considers much larger number interrelated factors in the development and functioning of language than “classical” general linguistics. And thus psycholinguistics, in comparison, significantly expands the subject of its research, which is the main difference between psycholinguistics and classical linguistics.

Psycholinguistics has not yet become a science with clearly defined boundaries, so it is hardly possible to give a comprehensive answer to the question of what aspects of language and speech this science studies and what methods it uses for this purpose.

To confirm this, just open any textbook on psycholinguistics. Unlike a textbook on linguistics, which will necessarily talk about phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, etc., or a textbook on psychology, which will certainly cover problems of perception, memory and emotions, the content of a textbook on psycholinguistics is decisively determined by In what scientific and cultural tradition is this textbook written?

Psycholinguistics, on the other hand, is initially focused on the study of the real processes of speaking and understanding, on “the person in language” (the expression of the French linguist E. Benveniste).
In the last three decades, especially in the last 10-15 years, interest in psycholinguistic issues has been growing noticeably in the “traditional” linguistic environment. It is no coincidence that since 1985, in the official nomenclature of linguistic specialties, approved by the Higher Attestation Commission, there has been a specialty defined as “general linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics.” Psycholinguistics is becoming an increasingly popular science among researchers.
Many linguists, having exhausted the possibilities of traditional approaches to language learning, look in psycholinguistics for answers to the questions that concern them.

Now many researchers (for example, A.A. Zalevskaya) write about the need integrated approach to the study of the patterns of functioning of the human language mechanism. When studying it, the researcher demonstrates obvious advantages going beyond linguistics and using the achievements of related sciences, in particular psycholinguistics. This science is actively developing and is very promising.

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There are 3 fundamentals that shaped psycholinguistics as a science:

• psychological and mental orientation: reflects the culture of the entire people, mental struggle. An indispensable condition communication, while a complete understanding of another individual is impossible;
• scientific works of American scientists: linguists believe that we can speak of complete mastery of a language if a person has the ability to construct and pronounce correct verbal signs. They describe their assumptions in dissertations and reports, which they take as the main parameters for the study of psycholinguistics;
• scientific activities of psychologists who study issues of language and speech formation.

Chernigovskaya T.V. - Psycholinguistics

What and how psycholinguistics studies

Psycholinguistics has several subjects of study, namely three. The reason is the specificity of this versatile science. Psycholinguistics is an artificial science that arose as a result of a unique merger of two other disciplines - linguistics and psychology. The following subjects of psycholinguistics are distinguished:

• individual opportunity speech reproduction as an exclusively human feature. Its structure, reasons and forms of implementation;
• language as the main way of reproducing thoughts;
• speech human as a way of implementing speech operations, various types of communication. Speech as a psychological source of the birth of statements.

The discipline studies the individual as a native speaker; process of communication in society.

Research methods psycholinguists divide into 3 categories:

• general methodology;
• concrete scientific methodology;
• specific scientific research methods.

The general methodology consists of a philosophy of worldview, general. Each speech specialist chooses a specific philosophical concept to study the theory of language. Speech activity is considered taking into account specific internal canons that are characteristic only of its composition.

Specific scientific methodology (special) includes methodological principles, various concepts and hypotheses, concepts and laws.

There are 4 main groups of research methods that are used in psycholinguistics:

1. organizational – study the patterns of speech formation. Includes comparative method (analysis different sides speech activity), complex method (research on an interdisciplinary basis) and longitudinal method (observation of the development of speech components);
2. empirical. Consist of impartial observation(analysis of reservations, specific statements) and (analysis of one’s own statements and manner of speech) K empirical methods include conversation, tests, questionnaires, questionnaires;
3. interpretive (the main principle is that in order to understand the nature of any facts, they must be considered together with scientific theories);
4. processing (method of describing the obtained facts, statistical method).

Psycholinguistics and other sciences

Naturally distinguish general And private psycholinguistics.

General studies the rules and facts of speech consciousness. They are typical for all native speakers. The object of general psycholinguistics is a static image of an adult individual, without analyzing his social or psychological differences from other people.

Particular psycholinguistics and its subgroups analyze various areas of language functioning. It takes into account the individual’s speech behavior, his type of activity, and specific physical and mental aspects of life. Divided into social and developmental psycholinguistics.

Sections of psycholinguistics

1. birth and understanding of speech;
2. functions and role of speech in society;
3. causal and semantic connections between linguistic characteristics;
4. on different stages his life.

The process of creating speech patterns is not observable and is difficult to structure. According to the psychological component, speech is born when a person translates his idea into speech activity. The speaker operates with semantic units that are created during the communication plan. The choice of lexical signs and grammatical foundations make the idea accessible to people around you.

Understanding speech involves extracting the meaning of a word from its intent. Speech signals are processed logically and sequentially. Speech perception requires linguistic knowledge and laws. If a phrase is incorrectly constructed, but reminds the addresser of words familiar to him, then they are perceived as known.

When perceiving a word or sentence main role plays with ambiguity. The word correlates with similar words of its semantic field.

The individual compares what is said with reality, his experience and knowledge. He can draw the necessary facts from in order to understand his interlocutor.

The meaning of psycholinguistics

Language and its components- a sign system that is necessary for society. A person is endowed with the ability to master speech from birth, but this ability must be realized. Psycholinguistics studies the speech of children to fully understand how this process occurs. He also explores the processes of deviation from the norm.

Psycholinguistics

1. History of psycholinguistics.

2. Methods of psycholinguistic research.

3. Main directions of research in psycholinguistics.

4. Psycholinguistic analysis of speech.

5. Speech disorders in mental illness.

History of psycholinguistics.

Studying psychological mechanisms speech activity was studied by W. von Humboldt and psychological scientists of the 19th century G. Steinthal, W. Wundt, A.A. Potebnya, I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay. This direction paved the way for the emergence of psycholinguistics.

Psycholinguistics emerged in the mid-20th century. It was first discussed as an independent science in 1953 at the International Seminar on Interdisciplinary Relations in the USA, held under the patronage of famous American scientists - psychologist Charles Osgood and anthropologist and ethnographer Thomas Sibeok. They called on scientists to explain the mechanisms of language functioning in the process of communication, to study the human factor in language, to comprehend the processes of speaking and understanding speech.

There are three directions in psycholinguistics: transformationist, associative and speech activity psycholinguistics.

In foreign psycholinguistics The associative and transformationist directions dominate.

The first psycholinguistic school was associative psycholinguistics, the founder of which was Charles Osgood. It is based on neobehaviorism - a doctrine according to which human behavior is considered as a system of reactions to stimuli coming from the external environment. The object of analysis of associative psycholinguistics is the word, the subject is the cause-and-effect relationships between words in a person’s verbal memory. Analysis is the study of stimulus words and reactions with associative connections between them. The main method is an associative experiment.

Transformational psycholinguistics based on the traditions of the school of speech mental activity George Miller and Noam Chomsky in the USA and the psychological school of Jean Piaget in France.

In America, Germany, England, Italy, transformationist psycholinguistics develops the ideas of Miller-Chomsky, which are based on the theory of generative grammar. According to this theory, thinking has innate grammatical knowledge, a limited system of rules that defines an infinite number of “correct” sentences and statements. With the help of this system of rules, the speaker builds a “correct” statement, and the listener decodes it and tries to understand it. To understand the processes of speaking and understanding, N. Chomsky introduces the concepts of “linguistic competence” and “linguistic activity”. Linguistic competence is potential knowledge of a language; it is primary. Language activity is the process of realizing this ability; it is secondary. In the processes of speaking and understanding, the scientist distinguishes between surface and deep grammatical structures. Deep structures are reproduced or transformed into superficial ones.

George Miller gave psychological explanation mechanisms for transforming deep structures into surface ones. Transformationist psycholinguistics studies the process of language acquisition, that is, the acquisition of abstract grammatical structures and the rules for their transformation.

In France, transformational psycholinguistics is based on the theory of psychologist Jean Piaget. He argued that a child’s thinking in its development overcomes the non-operational and formal-operational stages. A child’s speech develops under the influence of two factors: a) communication with other people and b) the transformation of external dialogue into internal dialogue (communication with oneself). Such egocentric speech can be observed when a person talks with a conventional interlocutor, with domestic animals, with plants, with inanimate objects. The goal of psycholinguistics is to study the process of speech formation in a child and the role of language in the development of intelligence and cognitive processes.

In domestic psycholinguistics dominates speech activity direction. Its origins were linguists and psychologists of the early 20th century: linguists Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Lev Petrovich Yakubinsky, Evgeniy Dmitrievich Polivanov, psychologists Lev Semenovich Vygotsky and Alexey Nikolaevich Leontiev. The main postulates of Russian psycholinguistics were set out in the work of L.V. Shcherba “On the threefold aspect of linguistic phenomena and on experiment in linguistics.” These are provisions 1) on the priority study of the processes of speaking and understanding (perception), 2) on the importance of studying “negative” language material (children’s speech and speech pathology), 3) on the need to use experimental methods in linguistics.

The psychological basis of Russian psycholinguistics was the cultural-historical psychology of L.S. Vygotsky. He put forward two fundamental ideas: a) speech activity is a combination of motive, purpose and hierarchical structure speech communication; b) at the center of speech activity is a person as a social being, since it is society that forms and regulates his speech-activity processes.

Teachings of L.S. Vygotsky removed psycholinguistics from the influence of behaviorism. It is devoid of those extremes that were inherent in foreign psycholinguistics. According to this theory, speech activity is part of human activity in general. Any activity is carried out with the help of a socially determined system of tools. "Tools" intellectual activity are signs. Signs open up new, more advanced possibilities for a person that unconditioned and conditioned reflexes cannot provide.

Thinking is an active cognitive activity. Thinking can be interpreted in two ways: a) as a process of reflecting the external world in the form of internal images, a process of transforming the material into the ideal; b) as an activity with missing objects. To carry out active cognitive activity with an absent object, a person needs a specific intermediary between the real object and its ideal analogue, image. Such an intermediary is a sign - a certain “object” capable of replacing the corresponding object in thought. The specificity of mental activity lies precisely in the fact that a person no longer operates with real objects, but with their symbolic substitutes.

The signs with the help of which thinking is carried out are divided into non-linguistic and linguistic. But in any case, thinking is a symbolic form of activity. In this regard, thinking can be non-linguistic and linguistic. Linguistic thinking is an activity with missing objects, based on linguistic signs. Linguistic signs are random, conventional, indifferent to objects, and have no genetic or meaningful connection with them. Therefore, the same object is denoted by different signs in different languages.

Interiorization in psychology (from the Latin Interior “internal” - the transition from outside to inside) is the process of transforming external practical actions into internal, mental ones. It is carried out using signs. The opposite process is exteriorization (from the Latin Exterior “external, external”). This is the transformation of mental, internal actions into external, practical ones.

Due to the fact that the focus of attention of Russian psycholinguistics was speech communication as an activity, it received a second name - "theory of speech activity".

L.S. Vygotsky argued that consciousness is systemic and this systematicity is determined by a system of signs. The signs themselves are not innate, but acquired. The meaning of a sign is the point of intersection of social and mental, external and internal; it is not only the result of activity, but also the activity itself. This understanding of the sign allows us to explain the dynamics of language. The word has different meanings in and out of context, it varies, and new meanings appear. The dynamics of linguistic units are most obvious in the utterance - the elementary unit of speech activity. The utterance, like a drop of water, reflects the characteristics of speech activity as a whole. Therefore, the focus of the theory of speech activity is the utterance, or more precisely, its generation.