TERMINOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE SCIENTIFIC WORLDVIEW IN THE STUDENT’S MENTAL LEXICON

TERMINOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE SCIENTIFIC WORLDVIEW IN THE STUDENT’S MENTAL LEXICON

Author:  A.A. Yakovlev

Affiliation:  Siberian Federal University

Abstract:  The paper discusses the associative experiment that included 77 participants (43 students of the first and 34 students of the fifth grades) and twelve stimuli which were linguistic terms (in English they are: predicate, lexicon, language, bilingualism, rheme, dialect, text, letter, utterance, word, speech, case). The author chose these terms according to the following considerations: some of them are studied at school (e.g. слово – word; падеж – case), some – only at University (e.g. рема – rheme, comment; предикат – predicate), and some are frequent in everyday life (e.g. текст – text). The stimuli were presented to the participants orally for reactions to be written down in special form. All the reactions were analysed and grouped so that we could reveal the difference between two groups of the participants. In the verbal reactions we suggest distinguishing such groups of syntagmatic reactions as characteristic, special case, acoustic resemblance (PREDICATE – syndicate), and culturally based (WORD – not a sparrow). There’s a difference between reactions called characteristic and special case. The second group refers to terminological or somehow fixed and clearly distinct (e.g. WORD – polysemantic) while the first one correlates only with a subjective assessment given by a person (e.g. TEXT – big). The results show that the transition of the term meanings to the scientific worldview is not strict or direct. So the experiment hypothesis can be proven partially. Although the reactions of the fifth grade students are in general more scientifically oriented they keep a significant everyday aspect in their meanings. Such aspect appears in the reaction to all the stimuli but especially to words that are not frequently used in scientific discourses. The words chosen as stimuli are built in different inner contexts (mental lexicon) but there’s no evidence to claim that such inner contexts in the fifth grade student’s mind are richer or more varied than the corresponding inner contexts in the first grade student’s mind. Despite this fact we can state a stronger attribution of the terms meaning to the scientific one in the fifth grade student’s mind (reactions like UTTERANCE – sentence (6), THEME – rheme (26) are to prove this statement, because in the other participants group they have the most frequent reaction quotation or the absence of any reaction respectively).

Keywords:  associative experiment, linguistic terms, word meaning, linguistic worldview, scientific worldview.

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Pages:  62-68