1.3.3. Association experiment

In linguistics, the long-standing interest in verbal associations is due to the very nature of linguistic meaning: a word as a sign of an object is connected with its denoted primarily by association.

By now, some classical provisions of the theory of associations have been defined, which we will dwell on in detail, since the methodology of the associative experiment lies at the basis of our research.

The unit of analysis is an associative structure - two objects between which there is an association. The minimal associative structure is a pair of words - stimulus - response (S > R). The arrow between them shows the direction of the associative connection. In writing, the stimulus word is highlighted in capital letters, A word-reaction– lowercase: GRANDMOTHER > girl. One stimulus can produce a whole chain of reactions, in which all previous reactions turn out to be additional stimuli for subsequent ones, for example: GRANDMOTHER > girl> (GIRL) > be in love> (LOVE) > life> (LIFE) > day... Intermediate stimuli seem to direct the process of association, while in the chain only adjacent words are associatively connected, and not the first and, for example, the last.

There are two types of association experiments:

1) a free associative experiment (hereinafter SAE), in which subjects are asked to respond with the first reaction that comes to mind when presented with a stimulus word, without limiting in any way either formal or semantic features reaction words;

2) a directed associative experiment (hereinafter referred to as NAE), in which the researcher in some way limits the choice of the intended reaction, gives additional instructions(for example, answer only with adjectives).

As the experimental data show, the direction of the association makes it much more concentrated, reduces the scatter (due to the removal of undirected reactions) and therefore allows, unlike SAE, to limit oneself to a significantly smaller number of informants to obtain reliable data. So, for example, in the SAE to the HIGH stimulus the most frequent reaction was short(18.6%). In NAE with oppositions in response to the stimulus HIGH associate short was obtained from 100% of informants. This kind of experiment makes it possible to detect certain aspects of the polysemy of a word (the distribution of the most frequent reactions to the word SMALL is as follows: deep 52%, large– 44%) or, on the contrary, synonymy (PROTECTION > attack, attack), or variability (reactions to the word FRIENDLY were distributed between hostile– 68% and hostile– 32%) (according to A.P. Klimenko).

The types of NAE are varied. One of the most famous and fruitful is the semantic differential of J. Osgood. This technique was created on the basis of several bipolar scales of adjectives denoting opposite characteristics, for example: strong - weak, kind - evil, etc. The manifestation of the corresponding characteristic is assessed up to seven points: from –3 to +3 or from +1 to +7, with the left the end of the scale is associated with the feature that is mentioned first. This is important, firstly, so that the assessment on the semantic differential is not associated with school system marks - the fewer, the worse; and secondly, for the objectivity of the assessment, in order to avoid automatic allocation of points. Using special research, the author of the methodology identified the most important human consciousness signs that are grouped around three basic ones - strength, assessment, activity.

The nonverbal version of the semantic differential was developed by V.F. Petrenko. According to this hypothesis, features are specified not by an antonymous pair, but certain figures.

Other versions of NAE are also quite common - interpretation of the meaning of the stimulus word (Dotsenko); unfolding a sentence or text from a word database (Clark); filling in gaps in context (Belyanin, Brudny). In any case, the use of associative experimental techniques makes it possible to obtain reliable and easily observable data for resolving controversial issues related to the speaker’s subjective experience of certain linguistic facts.

Associative responses are never random, they can be divided into at least two large groups, which are denoted by the terms “external” and “internal” associative connections.

“External” associative connections are usually understood as “associations by contiguity,” when a given word evokes any component of the visual situation in which the named object is included (for example, associative connections such as HOUSE > roof, DOG > tail).

“Internal” associative connections are understood as those connections that are caused by the inclusion of a word in a certain category (DOG > animal, OAK > tree). These associations are called “similarity associations” or “contrast associations.”

A.A. Zalevskaya and T.B. Vinogradov some pairs of stimulus words and associative reactions are called psychological similarities, i.e. similar or similar in meaning from the perspective of a native speaker of a given language (for example: CHILD > childhood, VEZTI > luck) .

The number of factors determining the appearance of a particular association has not been established with precision. There are associative reactions typical for some of this class situations; there are associations that are predominantly inherent in representatives of a certain group and are associated with their educational, professional, age, and gender characteristics; Finally, there are associations determined by the particular characteristics of the individual experience of a given person or his mental status.

The reactions obtained during the associative experiment are distributed mainly as syntagmatic and paradigmatic.

Syntagmatic reactions are those reactions that occur in subjects when they try to create a phrase with a given stimulus word (for example: TABLE > round). Paradigmatic reactions are words belonging to the same semantic group as the stimulus (TABLE > chair, BLACK > white), including synonyms, antonyms, etc. There is also a third type of associative reactions - thematic, the linguistic essence of which is that the reactions are not directly included in the semantic group with these stimuli and do not form combinations with them (for example: DARK > night).

According to Yu.N. Karaulova, all associative reactions should be interpreted “as traces of texts that passed at different times or pass in this moment through the associative-verbal network of the subject." Thus, the entire process of association (or, according to Karaulov, reconstruction of the network in AE) is the beginning of predication by the speaker, that is, the connection of an object and a feature in the broad sense of the word (for example: RESIDENT > this is an ordinary person RESIDENT > village, villages).

The study of the semantic properties of a word is one of the most developed areas in the study of verbal associations. Fundamental work in this area is the monograph by J. Deese “The Structure of Associations in Language and Thinking” [cit. from: 200, p. 23]. Deese was the first to experimentally establish and interpret the correlation between the semantic and associative characteristics of a word. He proposed a way to identify the intralingual associative meaning of a word by analyzing the distribution of associations for it. Scientists have proven that the distribution of reactions to a stimulus reflects the structure of the associative meaning of a word, and they have also identified two basic operations for classifying meaning: opposition and association. Based on this, two laws of verbal association are formulated:

1. There is an associative connection between elements (words) if they can be opposed to each other in a unique and unambiguous way;

2. There is an associative connection between elements (words) if they are combined on the basis of the commonality of two or more characteristics.

K. Noble proposed measuring the meaningfulness of a stimulus word through the number of words associated with it. He derived a formula for the meaning of a stimulus (the so-called Noble index) and with its help showed the degree of dependence between how deeply the subject understands the meaning of a particular word and how many and what kind of associations he has. Thus, the measure of meaningfulness of a certain word S, denoted as m s, is determined by Noble from the ratio of the sum of different “acceptable” associations for a given word for each subject (R i), taken for all subjects (N):

M s = N 1 å i=1 N R i

Yu.D. Apresyan developed a method for determining the degree of occurrence of a word in semantic fields, based on which semantic fields the associates of this word are included in. As a measure of the occurrence of word A in the semantic field of word B, Apresyan proposed the value M AB = (n in – 1): N, where n in is the number of reactions of B to word A, and N is the number of participants in the experiment.

During an associative experiment one can observe various aspects linguistic consciousness: and the plan for expressing a linguistic sign (phonetic associations such as YEAR > code, BATH > manna), and a content plan (various kinds of associations, during which subjects name words associated with given certain semantic connections, for example: GIRL > Little Red Riding Hood, Thumbelina), and the lexical system (typical lexical-paradigmatic associations like STOL > chair), and grammatical rules (syntagmatic associations like READ > book, quickly), and derivational or morphemic connections (YELLOW > turn yellow, yellowness, yellowish). An associative experiment reflects both the language system (lexical-paradigmatic, grammatical, word-formation, phonetic associations) and the desire for its textual use (syntagmatic associations, various kinds of textual reminiscences, etc.).

Thus, an associative experiment is capable of providing objective data on various aspects of the reflection of linguistic consciousness, including the linguistic creative activity of women and men.

Association experiment

In order to experimentally study the subjective semantic fields of words formed and functioning in the human mind, as well as the nature of the semantic connections of words within the semantic field, the method of associative experiment is used in psycholinguistics. Its authors in practical psychology are considered to be American psychologists X. G. Kent and A. J. Rozanov (1910). Psycholinguistic versions of the associative experiment were developed by J. Diese and C. Osgood (299, 331, etc.). In Russian psychology and psycholinguistics, the method of associative experiment was improved and tested in experimental studies by A. R. Luria and O. S. Vinogradova (44, 156, etc.).

Currently, the associative experiment is the most developed psychotherapy technique. linguistic analysis semantics of speech.

The procedure for the association experiment is as follows. The subjects are presented with a word or a whole set of words and told that they need to answer with the first words that come to mind. Typically, each subject is given 100 words and 7-10 minutes to answer*. Most of the reactions given in associative dictionaries were obtained from university and college students aged 17-25 years (the stimulus words were given in the subjects’ native language).

In applied psycholinguistics, several main variants of the associative experiment have been developed:

1. “Free” associative experiment. Subjects are not given any restrictions on verbal responses.

2. “Directed” associative experiment. The subject is asked to name only words of a certain grammatical or semantic class (for example, to select adjectives for nouns).

3. “Chain” associative experiment. The subjects are asked to respond to the stimulus word with several verbal associations at once - for example, to name 10 within 20 seconds different words or phrases.

Based on associative experiments in applied psycholinguistics, special “dictionaries of associative norms” (typical, “normative” associative reactions) have been created. In foreign specialized literature Among the most famous is J. Diese's dictionary (299). In Russian psycholinguistics, the first such dictionary (“Dictionary of associative norms of the Russian language”) was compiled by a team of authors under the leadership of A.A. Leontiev (213). Currently, the most complete dictionary is the “Russian Associative Dictionary” (Yu. N. Karaulov, Yu. A. Sorokin, E. F. Tarasov, N. V. Ufimtseva, etc.). It contains about 1300 stimulus words (in “everyday” speech, in live conversational communication 2.5-3 thousand words are used). It contains about thirteen thousand different words as typical verbal reactions; In total, the dictionary contains over a million verbal reactions.

Dictionary entries in the “Russian Associative Dictionary” have following structure: first the stimulus word is given, then the responses, arranged in descending order of frequency (indicated by a number). Within each group, verbal reactions are indicated in alphabetical order(198). The first number indicates the total number of reactions to stimuli, the second - the number of different reactions, the third - the number of subjects who left a given stimulus without a response, i.e. the number of refusals. The fourth digital indicator is the number of one-time responses.

Methodology for assessing data from an association experiment. There are several options possible interpretation results of an association experiment. Let's list some of them.

When analyzing the verbal reactions of the subjects, first of all, the so-called syntagmatic (the sky is blue, the tree is growing, the car is driving, smoking is harmful) and paradigmatic (table - chair, mother - father) associations are identified.

Syntagmatic associations are those whose grammatical class is different from the grammatical class of the stimulus word and which always express predicative relations. Paradigmatic associations are reaction words of the same grammatical class as the stimulus words. They obey the semantic principle of “minimal contrast”, according to which the less the stimulus words differ from the reaction words in the composition of semantic components, the higher the probability of actualizing the reaction word in the associative process. This principle explains why, based on the nature of the associations, it is possible to restore the semantic composition of the stimulus word: a number of associations that have arisen in the subject for a given word contain a number of features similar to those contained in the stimulus word (for example: summer, summer, began, vacation , soon, cheers, idleness, school, holiday camp). Based on these verbal reactions, one can quite easily reconstruct the stimulus word (in this case, the word vacation).

Some researchers believe that paradigmatic associations reflect linguistic relations (in particular, the relations of words-tokens within the framework of lexical and grammatical paradigms), and syntagmatic associations reflect the subject relations displayed in speech (21, 155, 251, etc.).

Among verbal reactions in psycholinguistics, there are also reactions that reflect genus-species relations(cat - pet, table - furniture), “sound” associations that have phonetic similarity to the stimulus (cat - baby, house - volume), reactions reflecting situational connections of designated objects (cat - milk, mouse), “clichéd” restorative " speech clichés"(master - golden hands, guest - uninvited), "socially determined" (woman - mother, housewife), etc.

The method of associative experiment is widely used in various fields of psycholinguistics (sociopsycholinguistics, applied psycholinguistics, etc.). Due to the fact that it is usually carried out on a large number of subjects, based on the data obtained, it is possible to construct a table of the frequency distribution of reaction words to each stimulus word. In this case, the researcher has the opportunity to calculate semantic proximity (“semantic distance”) between in different words. A unique measure of the semantic proximity of a pair of words is the degree of coincidence in the distribution of answers, i.e., the similarity of the associations given to them. This indicator appears in the works of various authors under the following names: “intersection coefficient”, “association coefficient”, “overlap measure” (299, 331).

The associative experiment is also used as one of the additional methods of distributive-statistical analysis of texts, when researchers conduct a statistical calculation of the frequency of word combinations different types(the so-called “distribution”). An association experiment allows you to find out how speech activity components of the linguistic consciousness of native speakers of a given language are realized.

In addition to its very active use in applied linguistics and psycholinguistics, the associative experiment is widely used in practical psychology, sociology, psychiatry, as a method of psychological-linguistic diagnosis and examination.

J. Diese (299) in his psycholinguistic experiments tried to reconstruct the “semantic composition” of a word based on data from an associative experiment. He subjected matrices of semantic distances of secondary associations to the stimulus word (i.e., associations to associations) to the “factor analysis” procedure. The factors he identified ( frequency characteristics verbal reactions, types of associative correlations) received a meaningful interpretation and were considered as semantic components of meaning. A. A. Leontyev, commenting on the results of J. Diese’s experiments, concludes that they clearly show the possibility of identifying (based on processing data from an associative experiment) factors that can be interpreted as semantic components of words. Thus, an associative experiment can serve as a means of obtaining both linguistic and psychological knowledge about the semantic component of language signs and the patterns of their use in speech activity (123, 139).

Thus, an associative experiment shows the presence in the meaning of a word (as well as in the denotation - the image of the object denoted by the word) of a psychological component. Thus, an associative experiment makes it possible to identify or clarify semantic structure any word. Its data can serve as valuable material for studying the psychological equivalents of what in psycholinguistics is defined by the concept of “semantic field”, behind which there are semantic connections of words that objectively exist in the mind of a native speaker (155, etc.).

One of the main distinctive features of the associative experiment is its simplicity and accessibility of use, since it can be carried out individually and simultaneously with large group subjects. Subjects operate on the meaning of a word in the context of the situation speech communication, which makes it possible to identify during the experiment some unconscious components of meaning. Thus, according to the results of an experiment conducted by V.P. Belyanin (21), it was found that the word exam in the minds of native Russian language students also contains such emotional-evaluative “psychological components” of the semantics of this word, such as difficult, fear, scary, heavy. It should be noted that they are not reflected in the corresponding “associative” dictionaries.

Associative experiments show that one of the personal psychological features of associative reactions of subjects of different ages (respectively, having different levels language development) is expressed in varying degrees leading orientation to the phonological and grammatical features of the stimulus word.

At the same time, some phonetic (“sound”) associations can also be considered as semantic (mother - frame, house - smoke, guest - bone). Most often, the predominance of such associations is observed in children who have not yet sufficiently mastered the semantics of signs native language, as well as in children who are lagging behind in speech development. (In adults, they can occur against a background of fatigue, for example, at the end of a long experiment.) A high degree of frequency or predominance of phonetic associations is also characteristic of individuals (both children and adults) with disorders intellectual development (21, 155).

A significant part of verbal associations in adolescents and adults is due to speech stamps and clichés. At the same time, associations also reflect various aspects of the cultural and historical experience of the subject (capital - Moscow, square - Krasnaya) and textual reminiscences (master - Margarita).

The associative experiment is of particular importance for practical psychology; it is no coincidence that it is one of the oldest methods experimental psychology. Among the first variants of the associative experiment is the method of “free associations” by H. G. Kent - A. J. Rozanov (313). It uses a set of 100 words as stimuli. Speech reactions to these words are standardized on the material large number studies (mentally healthy people, mainly adults), on the basis of which the proportion of non-standard speech reactions (their relationship with standard ones) was determined. These data make it possible to determine the degree of originality and “eccentricity” of the subjects’ thinking.

Semantic fields of words " active dictionary“(as well as the associative reactions they define) each person is distinguished by great individual originality, both in the composition of lexical units and in the strength of semantic connections between them. The actualization of a particular connection in a response is not accidental and may even depend on the situation (for example, in a child: friend - Vova). The structure and characteristics of a person’s speech (verbal) memory are greatly influenced by the general level of education and culture. Thus, associative experiments of a number domestic psychologists and linguists found that persons with higher technical education more often make paradigmatic associations, and those with a humanitarian education - syntagmatic ones (41, 102).

The nature of associations is affected by both age and geographical conditions, and the person's profession. According to A. A. Leontyev (139), different reactions to the same stimulus in his experiment were given by residents of Yaroslavl (brush - rowan trees) and Dushanbe (brush - grapes); people of different professions: a conductor (hand - smooth, soft), a nurse in the surgical department of a hospital (hand - amputation) and a builder (hand - hairy).

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 given language(poet - Yesenin, number - three, friend - faithful, friend - enemy, friend - comrade). According to the Russian psycholinguist A. A. Zalevskaya (90), the nature of verbal associations is also determined by the cultural and historical traditions of a particular people. Here are, for example, typical verbal associations for the word “bread”: a Russian person has bread and salt, an Uzbek has bread and tea, a Frenchman has bread and wine, etc. The data obtained by A. A. Zalevskaya is indicative in this regard when comparing verbal associations “in a historical perspective.” Thus, when the author compared associations to the same stimuli, it turned out that the three most frequent reactions to the stimulus word “bread” in 1910 on average accounted for approximately 46% of all responses, and in 1954 - already about 60% of all responses, i.e. the most common reactions have become even more common. This can be explained by the fact that as a result of standard education, the influence of radio, television and other means mass communication the stereotypicality of speech reactions increased, and people themselves began to carry out their speech actions more uniformly (21, 90).

Lesson 7.15 DIRECTED ASSOCIATION EXPERIMENT

Directed association experiment from various options free differs in that the subject, in response to stimulus words, responds (or writes down) not with any words that come to his mind, but in accordance with the experimenter’s instructions. Thus, the associative reactions of the subjects seem to be directed along a certain direction. This imposes restrictions on the mental search processes of the subjects when choosing suitable words from those available to them. Instructions may vary in both focus and degree of complexity. For example, the selection of reactions-antonyms or synonyms - more easy task than selection based on the principle of generic or power relations. The number of stimuli, as in the previous version of the free associative experiment, is 30-40 words, but in accordance with the instructions they are selected more meaningfully, for example, from a dictionary of synonyms or antonyms.

Instructions for subjects:“In response to the presented stimulus word, write down the word opposite meaning(antonym)".

List of stimulus words

1. Anger 16. Top

2. Mister 17. Dim

3. Sluggishness 18. Love

4. Shame 19. Land

5. Rival 20. Culture

6. Black 21. Woman

7. Jump 22. Child

8. Beautiful 23. Nakhodka

9. Virgin Land 24. Nadezhda

10. Humanity 25. Frost

11. Laughter 26. Work

12. Attack 27. Smooth

13. Storm 28. Take

14. Boredom 29. Praise

15. Trouble 30. Adagio

For rate experimental results a table should be prepared (Table 7.15.1) indicating adequate reactions, inadequate and approximately correct, so-called semantic paraphasias (para - about, phase - meaning).

Table 7.15.1

Results of a directed association experiment

With good or satisfactory knowledge of the language and active use of its internal structural connections, subjects will show high results in the second column - adequate reactions, up to 100%. The indicators in the third column will also be good enough for diagnosis, but it is still advisable to more accurately follow the experimenter’s instructions. For example, if the subject responds to the stimulus word “shame” with the word “pride,” then such a response will fall into the second column, since according to the dictionary of antonyms of the Russian language it was necessary to write the words “honor,” “glory,” or “honor.” The third column contains those responses of the subjects that do not correspond to the instructions at all. For example, in response to the word “shame,” the subject writes the words “shame,” “condemnation,” and others that do not correspond to the idea of ​​the opposite. Directed association test Thus, it tests not only knowledge of the language, but also the ability to think logically, relate Various types connections, differentiate individual characteristics.

Correct antonym answers: 1 - kindness, 2 - servant, slave, 3 - agility, dexterity, agility, 4 - honor, glory, honour, 5 - partner, colleague, like-minded person, 6 - white, 7 - stand, 8 - ugly, ugly, ugly, 9 - arable land, arable land, cultivated land, 10 - misanthropy, 11 - crying, 12 - defense, protection, 13 - quiet, peace, 14 - fun, 15 - joy, 16 - base, sole, 17 - bright, 18 - hate, 19 - sea, water, 20 - ignorance, 21 - man, 22 - old man, 23 - loss, 24 - despair, 25 - heat, 26 - rest, idleness, 27 - rough, 28 - give, 29 - abuse, swearing, criticism, 30 - allegro, presto, scherzo.

Lesson 7.16 CHAIN ​​ASSOCIATION TEST

Chain association is understood as the uncontrolled, spontaneous course of the process of reproducing the contents of the subject’s consciousness and subconscious, the so-called “flow of the subconscious”. This method is readily used by psychoanalysis specialists. In an individual conversation with their patients, they invite them to say whatever they want in a relaxed state with no or reduced self-control, i.e., they invite them to “talk it out.” Later, this speech material is analyzed to identify unconscious anxieties, phobias, drives and transfer them to the level of awareness and verbalization. For greater convenience and reliability of the results, subjects are asked to pronounce any individual words that come to their minds over a certain period of time. The result is a chain of associative reactions made up of individual words. These words, regardless of the wishes of the subjects, are combined into certain semantic groups, or semantic nests. The size and number of semantic nests may be different, which determines individual characteristics. In one nest there can be from one word to several and even all words of the chain: for example, in the chain “song, cheerful, voice, beautiful, metal, gold, silver, glitters, spring, flowers, aroma” three semantic nests of 3 are distinguished -4 words each. These nests, in accordance with their contents, fall under a more general category - name. In this example, these could be the names “beautiful song”, “shiny metal”, “blooming spring”. Judging by the names and small sizes of semantic nests, this subject does not experience any special anxiety or any worries, so the psychoanalyst limits himself to ordinary conversation. If the size of the nest becomes large - 10-15 words, and the names reflect unpleasant emotional events, for example, fear of robbery or a painful state, the task of the psychoanalyst becomes the development of constructive measures to remove the patient from a painful state.

The procedure for conducting a chain associative experiment. Subjects occupy comfortable position and, at the direction of the experimenter, begin to complete the task.

Instructions:“For one minute, write down any words that come to your mind. Do not list objects in your field of vision, and do not recall previously memorized series of words. Let's start! It is advisable to repeat the experiment several times to compare the results obtained.

Data processing

1. Determine the length of the associative series by counting the number of words written down in 1 minute (Table 7.16.1).

Table 7.16.1

Results of the study of the chain association experiment

2. Determine the structure of the associative series, for which you first count the number of semantic nests using the logical correlation of adjacent words with each other.

3. Define the average size semantic nests by dividing the number of words in the entire chain by the number of nests.

4. Give names to the largest semantic nests.

5. Determine the average size of the associative chain in several experiments, the average number of semantic nests, their average size and the most common names.

At analysis of experimental data You need to pay attention to the following. Numerous experiments have shown that for a healthy, active person who knows a given language well, the average length of an associative chain in 1 minute is 19-21 words. If the indicators are too low, for example 10 words per minute, it can be assumed that speech and thought processes are inhibited, caused by various reasons: fatigue, poor knowledge of the language, rigidity of thinking. Elevated rates (35-40 words per minute) indicate excessive mobility of speech and thought processes, which may be caused by painful excitability, feverish state, and emotional agitation. When assessing the structure of an associative series, you should pay attention to the fact that the norm is the formation of 3-4 nests in 1 minute with an average size of 5-6 words per nest. Increasing the number of nests and decreasing the number of words in a nest, just like reverse process, reflect dynamic features speech and mental activity associated with excitation or inhibition and the direction of subconscious and conscious processes.

Topic 6. THEORETICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL APPROACHES TO PERSONALITY RESEARCH

Lecture (2 hours)

General concept about personality in psychology. Genotypic and phenotypic, biological and social in individual human development. The role of individual human properties in personality development. Basic psychological theories and personality research. Properties, structures and typologies of personality - A.N. Leontyev, S.L. Rubinstein, B.G. Ananyev, A.V. Petrovsky, K.K. Platonov, A.G. Asmolov. Personality as a system of relationships (Myasishchev V.N.). Individuality of the individual and his life path Personality development in the process of personality socialization. Main factors and mechanisms of personality development.

The concept of personality orientation and its psychological manifestations. Motivational sphere of a person: motive and motivation; theories of motivation. Basic patterns of development motivational sphere. Needs. Classifications of needs. A. Maslow's theory.

Maklakov A. G. General psychology. - St. Petersburg: Peter, 2001. - 592 p.: ill. - (Series “Textbook of the New Century”)

Chapter 20. Personality

20.1. General concept of personality

In psychological science, the category “personality” is one of the basic concepts. But the concept of “personality” is not purely psychological and is studied by everyone social sciences, including philosophy, sociology, pedagogy, etc. What is the specificity of the study of personality within the framework of psychological science and what is a personality with psychological point vision?

First of all, let's try to answer the second part of the question. This is not so easy to do, since when asked what personality is, all psychologists answer differently. The variety of their answers and differences of opinion indicate the complexity of the personality phenomenon itself. On this occasion, I. S. Kon writes: “On the one hand, it designates a specific individual (person) as a subject of activity, in the unity of his individual properties (individual) and his social roles (general). On the other hand, personality is understood as social property an individual, as a set of socially significant traits integrated in him, formed in the process of direct and indirect interaction of this person with other people and making him, in turn, a subject of labor, cognition and communication”*.

Each of the definitions of personality available in the scientific literature is supported by experimental research and theoretical justification and therefore deserves to be taken into account when considering the concept of “personality”. Most often, personality is understood as a person in the totality of his social and vital qualities acquired by him in the process of social development. Consequently, it is not customary to include human characteristics that are associated with the genotypic or physiological organization of a person as personal characteristics. It is also not accepted among personal qualities to include

* Kon I. S. Sociology of personality. - M.: Politizdat, 1967.

Chapter 20. Personality 471

carry human qualities that characterize the development of his cognitive mental processes or individual style activities, with the exception of those that manifest themselves in relationships with people and society as a whole. Most often, the content of the concept “personality” includes sustainable properties people who determine actions that are significant in relation to other people.

Thus, personality is a specific person, taken in the system of his stable socially conditioned psychological characteristics, which manifest themselves in social connections and relationships, determine his moral actions and are of significant importance for himself and those around him.

It should be noted that in the scientific literature, the concept of “personality” sometimes includes all levels of the hierarchical organization of a person, including genetic and physiological. When considering issues related to personality, we will proceed from the above definition. What is our opinion based on?

As you remember, we did not begin our study of the general psychology course with the definition psychological science, but from the fact that we considered the issue of a systematic study of man himself. We focused on the fact that psychology has developed its own idea of ​​the problem of human research. This idea was substantiated by B. G. Ananyev, who identified four levels of human organization that are of greatest interest for scientific research. These included the individual, subject of activity, personality, individuality,

Each person as a representative biological species has certain innate features, i.e. the structure of its body determines the possibility of walking upright, the structure of the brain ensures the development of intelligence, the structure of the hand implies the possibility of using tools, etc. With all these features, a human baby differs from a baby animal. Affiliation specific person To to the human race fixed in the concept individual. Thus, the concept of “individual” characterizes a person as a bearer of certain biological properties.

Being born as an individual, a person is included in the system of social relationships and processes, as a result of which he acquires a special social quality- he becomes personality. This happens because a person, being included in the system of public relations, acts as subject - the bearer of consciousness, which is formed and developed in the process of activity.

In turn, the developmental features of all these three levels characterize the uniqueness and originality of a particular person, determine his individuality. Thus, the concept of “personality” characterizes one of the most significant levels human organization, namely the features of its development as social being. It should be noted that in the domestic psychological literature one can find some differences in views on the hierarchy of human organization. In particular, such a contradiction can be found among representatives of the Moscow and St. Petersburg psychological schools. For example, representatives of the Moscow school, as a rule, do not distinguish the level of “subject”, combining the biological and mental properties of a person in the concept of “individual”. However, despite certain differences, the concept of “personality” in Russian psychology correlates with the social organization of a person.

472 Part IV. Mental properties personalities

When considering personality structure, it usually includes abilities, temperament, character, motivation and social attitudes. All these qualities will be discussed in detail in subsequent chapters, but for now We Let us limit ourselves only to their general definitions.

Capabilities - These are individually stable properties of a person that determine his success in various activities. Temperament - This is a dynamic characteristic of human mental processes. Character contains qualities that determine a person’s attitude towards other people. Motivation - is a set of motivations for activity, and social attitudes - these are people's beliefs.

In addition, some authors include concepts such as will and emotions in the personality structure. We discussed these concepts in the “Mental Processes” section. The fact is that in the structure of mental phenomena it is customary to distinguish mental processes, mental states and mental properties. In turn, mental processes are divided into cognitive, volitional and emotional. Thus, will and emotions have every reason to be considered within the framework of mental processes as independent phenomena.

However, authors who consider these phenomena within the framework of the personality structure also have reasons for this. For example, feelings - one of the types of emotions - most often have social orientation, A strong-willed qualities are present in the regulation of human behavior as a member of society. All this, on the one hand, once again speaks of the complexity of the problem we are considering, and on the other, of certain disagreements regarding certain aspects of the personality problem. Moreover, the greatest disagreements are caused by problems of the hierarchy of the structure human organization, as well as the relationship between the biological and the social in personality. We will look at the last problem in more detail.

20.2. The relationship between the social and the biological in personality

The concepts of “personality” and “individuality”, from the point of view of domestic psychology, do not coincide. Moreover, in Russian psychological science there are quite a lot of disagreements about the relationship between these concepts. From time to time, scientific disputes arise on the question of which of these concepts is broader. From one point of view (which is most often presented in the works of representatives of the St. Petersburg psychological school), individuality combines those biological and social characteristics of a person that make him different from other people, i.e. the concept of “individuality” from this position seems broader than the concept of “personality”. From another point of view (which can most often be found among representatives of the Moscow psychological school), the concept of “individuality” is considered as the narrowest in the structure of human organization, uniting only a relatively small group of qualities. What these approaches have in common is that the concept of “personal

Chapter 20. Personality 473

"ness" includes, first of all, human qualities that manifest themselves at the social level during the formation of social relations and connections of a person.

At the same time, there are a number of psychological concepts in which the individual is not considered as a subject of the system public relations, but is presented as a holistic integrative formation that includes all human characteristics, including biological, mental and social. Therefore, it is believed that with the help of special personality questionnaires can describe a person as a whole. This difference of opinion is caused by differences in approaches to considering the relationship between the biological and the social in the structure of a person’s personality.

The problem of the relationship between the biological and the social in human personality is one of the central problems modern psychology. In the process of formation and development of psychological science, almost all possible connections between the concepts of “mental”, “social” and “biological” were considered. Mental development was interpreted as a completely spontaneous process, independent of either biological or social, and as derived only from biological or only from social development, or as a result of their parallel action on the individual, etc. Thus, several groups of concepts can be distinguished , who differently consider the relationship between the social, mental and biological.

In the group of concepts that prove the spontaneity of mental development, the mental is viewed as a phenomenon completely subordinate to its own internal laws, in no way connected with either the biological or the social. At best, the human body, within the framework of these concepts, is assigned the role of a kind of “container” mental activity. Most often we come across this position among authors who prove the divine origin of psychic phenomena.

In biologizing concepts, the mental is considered as linear function development of the organism, as something that unambiguously follows this development. From the perspective of these concepts, all features of mental processes, states and properties of a person are determined by the features biological structure, and their development is subject exclusively to biological laws. In this case, laws discovered in the study of animals are often used, which do not take into account the specifics of the development of the human body. Often in these concepts to explain mental development the basic biogenetic law is invoked - the law of recapitulation, according to which in the development of an individual the evolution of the species to which this individual belongs is reproduced in its main features. An extreme manifestation of this position is the statement that the mental as an independent phenomenon does not exist in nature, since all mental phenomena can be described or explained using biological (physiological) concepts. It should be noted that given point vision is very widespread among physiologists. For example, I.P. Pavlov adhered to this point of view.

There are a number of sociological concepts that also proceed from the idea of ​​recapitulation, but here it is presented somewhat differently. Within the framework of these concepts, it is argued that the mental development of an individual in a summary form reproduces the main stages of the process of historical development of society, primarily the development of its spiritual life and culture.

The essence of such concepts was most clearly expressed by V. Stern. In his proposed interpretation, the principle of recapitulation covers both the evolution of the animal psyche and the history of the spiritual development of society. He writes: “The human individual in the first months of infancy, with a predominance of lower feelings, with an unreflective reflexive and impulsive existence, is in the mammalian stage; in the second half of the year, having developed the activity of grasping and versatile imitation, he reaches the development of a higher mammal - a monkey, and in the second year, having mastered vertical gait and speech - elementary human condition. In the first five years of play and fairy tales, he stands on the level of primitive peoples. This is followed by entry into school, a more intense introduction into a social whole with certain responsibilities - an ontogenetic parallel to a person’s entry into culture with its state and economic organizations. In the first school years, the simple content of the ancient and Old Testament world is most adequate childish spirit, middle years bear the features

fanaticism of Christian culture, and only in the period of maturity is spiritual differentiation achieved, corresponding to the state of culture of the New Age"*.

Of course, we will not discuss the question of the truth of this or that approach. However, in our opinion, when citing such analogies, one cannot fail to take into account the system of training and education, which develops historically in every society and has its own specifics in each socio-historical formation. Moreover, each generation of people finds society at a certain stage of its development and is included in the system of social relations that has already taken shape at this stage. Therefore, in his development, man does not need to repeat the entire previous history in a condensed form.

No one will dispute the fact that a person is born as a representative of a certain biological species. At the same time, after birth, a person finds himself in a certain social environment and therefore develops not only as a biological object, but also how representative of a particular society.

* Stern V. Basics of human genetics. - M., 1965.

476 Part IV. Mental properties of personality

Of course, these two trends are reflected in the patterns of human development. Moreover, these two tendencies are in constant interaction, and for psychology it is important to clarify the nature of their relationship.

The results of numerous studies of the patterns of human mental development suggest that the initial prerequisite for the mental development of an individual is his biological development. An individual is born with a certain set biological properties and physiological mechanisms, which act as the basis of his mental development. But these prerequisites are realized only when a person is in the conditions of human society.

Considering the problem of interaction and mutual influence of biological and social in human mental development, we distinguish three levels of human organization: the level of biological organization, the social level and the level of mental organization. Thus, it is necessary to keep in mind that we're talking about about interaction in the triad “biological-mental-social”. Moreover, the approach to studying the relationship between the components of this triad is formed from an understanding psychological essence concept of "personality". However, answering the question of what personality is psychologically is in itself a very difficult task. Moreover, the solution to this issue has its own history.

It should be noted that in various domestic psychological schools, the concept of “personality”, and even more so the relationship between the biological and the social in the individual, their role in mental development, is interpreted differently. Despite the fact that all domestic psychologists unconditionally accept the point of view that states that the concept of “personality” refers to the social level of human organization, there are certain disagreements on the issue of the degree to which social and biological determinants are manifested in the individual. Thus, the difference in views on this problem we will find in the works of representatives of Moscow and St. Petersburg universities, which are the leading centers of Russian psychology. For example, in the works of Moscow scientists one can most often find the opinion that social determinants play a more significant role in the development and formation of personality. At the same time, the works of representatives of St. Petersburg University prove the idea that social and biological determinants are equally important for the development of personality.

From our point of view, despite the divergence of views on certain aspects of personality research, in general these positions rather complement each other.

In the history of Russian psychology, the idea of ​​the psychological essence of personality has changed several times. Initially, the understanding of personality is precisely how psychological category was based on enumeration components, forming the personality as a certain mental reality. In this case, personality acts as a set of qualities, properties, traits, and characteristics of the human psyche. From a certain point of view, this approach was very convenient, since it allowed us to avoid a number of theoretical difficulties. However, this approach to the problem of understanding the psychological essence of the concept of “personality” was called “collector’s” by academician A. V. Petrovsky, for in this case of personal

Chapter 20. Personality 477

ity turns into a kind of container, a container that absorbs interests, abilities, traits of temperament, character, etc. From the perspective of this approach, the task of a psychologist comes down to cataloging all this and identifying the individual uniqueness of its combination in each individual person. This approach deprives the concept of “personality” of its categorical content.

In the 60s. XX century The issue of structuring numerous personal qualities came up on the agenda. Since the mid-1960s. Attempts began to be made to elucidate the general structure of personality. The approach of K.K. Platonov, who understood personality as a kind of biosocial hierarchical structure, is very characteristic in this direction. The scientist identified the following substructures in it: direction; experience (knowledge, abilities, skills); individual characteristics of various forms of reflection (sensation, perception, memory, thinking) and, finally, the combined properties of temperament.

It should be noted that K. K. Platonov’s approach was subject to some criticism with on the part of domestic scientists, and above all representatives of the Moscow psychological school. This was due to the fact that general structure personality was interpreted as a certain set of its biological and socially determined characteristics. As a result, the problem of the relationship between the social and biological in personality became almost the main problem in personality psychology. In contrast to the opinion of K.K. Platonov, the idea was expressed that the biological, entering the human personality, becomes social.

By the end of the 1970s, in addition to focusing on a structural approach to the problem of personality, the concept of a systems approach began to develop. In this regard, the ideas of A. N. Leontiev are of particular interest.

Let us briefly characterize the features of Leontiev’s understanding of personality. Personality, in his opinion, is a special type of psychological formation generated by a person’s life in society. The subordination of various activities creates the basis of personality, the formation of which occurs in the process of social development (ontogenesis). Leontyev did not include the genotypically determined characteristics of a person - physical constitution, type of nervous system, temperament, biological needs, affectivity, natural inclinations, as well as lifetime acquired knowledge, skills and abilities, including professional ones. The categories listed above, in his opinion, constitute the individual properties of a person. The concept of “individual,” according to Leontiev, reflects, firstly, the integrity and indivisibility of a particular person as a separate individual of a given biological species and, secondly, the characteristics of a particular representative of the species that distinguish it from other representatives of this species. Why did Leontiev divide these characteristics into two groups: individual and personal? In his opinion, individual properties, including those genotypically determined, can change in a variety of ways during a person’s life. But this does not make them personal, because personality is not an individual enriched by previous experience. The properties of an individual do not transform into personality properties. Even transformed, they remain individual properties, not defining the emerging personality, but constituting only the prerequisites and conditions for its formation.

478 Part IV. Mental properties of personality

The approach to understanding the problem of personality formulated by Leontiev has found its way further development in the works of domestic psychologists - representatives of the Moscow school, including A.V. Petrovsky. In the textbook “General Psychology”, prepared under his editorship, the following definition of personality is given: “Personality in psychology refers to a systemic social quality acquired by an individual in subject activity and communication and characterizing the level and quality of representation of social relations in the individual”*.

What is personality as a special social quality of an individual? First of all, one should proceed from the fact that the concepts of “individual” and “personality” are not identical. Personality is a special quality that is acquired by an individual in society in the process of entering into relations that are social in nature. Therefore, very often in Russian psychology, personality is considered as a “supersensible” quality, although the bearer of this quality is a completely sensual, bodily individual with all his innate and acquired properties.

To understand the basis on which certain personality traits are formed, we need to consider a person’s life in society. The inclusion of an individual in the system of social relations determines the content and nature of the activities he performs, the circle and methods of communication with other people, i.e., the characteristics of his social existence, lifestyle. But the way of life of individual individuals, certain communities of people, as well as society as a whole is determined by the historically developing system of social relations. This means that personality can only be understood or studied in the context of specific social conditions, a specific historical era. Moreover, it should be noted that for an individual, society is not just the external environment. The individual is constantly included in the system of social relations, which is mediated by many factors.

Petrovsky believes that the personality of a particular person can continue in other people, and with the death of the individual it does not completely die. And in the words “he lives in us even after death” there is neither mysticism nor pure metaphor, it is a statement of the fact of the ideal representation of the individual after his material disappearance.

Considering further the point of view of representatives of the Moscow psychological school on the problem of personality, it should be noted that in the concept of personality in most cases the authors include certain properties, belonging to the individual, and this also means those properties that determine the uniqueness of the individual, his individuality. However, the concepts of “individual”, “personality” and “individuality” are not identical in content - each of them reveals a specific aspect of a person’s individual existence. Personality can be understood only in a system of stable interpersonal connections mediated by content, values, meaning joint activities each of the participants. These interpersonal connections are real, but supersensual in nature. They manifest themselves in specific individual properties and the actions of people included in the team, but are not limited to them.

Just as the concepts of “individual” and “personality” are not identical, personality and individuality, in turn, form unity, but not identity.

* General psychology: Proc. for pedagogical students Institute / Ed. A. V. Petrovsky. - 3rd ed., revised. and additional - M.: Education, 1986.

Chapter 20. Personality 479

If personality traits are not represented in the system of interpersonal relations, they turn out to be insignificant for assessing personality and do not receive conditions for development, just as only personality traits, in the nai to a greater extent"drawn" into the leading one for a given social community activity. Individual characteristics a person until a certain time do not manifest themselves in any way until they become necessary in the system of interpersonal relations, the subject of which will be this person as an individual. Therefore, according to representatives of the Moscow psychological school, individuality is only one of the aspects of a person’s personality.

Thus, in the position of representatives of the Moscow psychological school, two main points can be traced. Firstly, personality and its characteristics are compared with the level social manifestation qualities and properties of a person. Secondly, personality is considered as a social product, in no way connected with biological determinants, and therefore, we can conclude that the social has a greater influence on the mental development of the individual.

The idea of ​​the problem of personality, formed within the framework of the St. Petersburg psychological school, is most clearly presented in the works of B. G. Ananyev. The first distinctive feature of Ananyev’s approach to considering the problem of personality psychology is that, unlike representatives of the Moscow psychological school, who consider three levels of human organization “individual - personality - individuality,” he identifies the following levels: “individual - subject of activity - personality - individuality” . This is the main difference in approaches, which is largely due to different views on the relationship between the biological and the social and their influence on the process of human mental development.

Association is a concept in psycholinguistics that denotes the connection various objects and phenomena of reality in human consciousness. This connection is usually based on personal experience: life or cultural. Scientists have long studied associations by offering people different types of stimuli, such as words, images, color samples, and considering their interpretations as an indicator of the outcome. Psycholinguistics studies only verbal associative processes, offering verbal designations as stimuli during an associative experiment. The accepted method of associative experiment presents a set of stimulus words that should generate reaction words. Associative reactions are spontaneous in nature, that is, the one who participates in the experiment cannot use time for thinking, but must present the first answer that arises in his mind.

Associative connections are to some extent automated elements, since a person does not think about why one word is connected to another and where this connection originates. The associations that arise are the result of experience gained during life, various types of knowledge, which is why “reaction words are part of the deep, unconscious.” The phenomenon of an association experiment is that people belonging to the same culture and the same social group usually give similar responses to the same stimuli. Based on this, associative dictionaries reflect the existing associative norm, which is fixed as a result of a mass experiment and becomes an “expected” reaction.

Association experiments

Methods of association experiments allow us to identify following types associative connections:

1. semantic proximity (the associative reaction is a synonymous word): good - kind, big - huge;
2. semantic opposite (the associative reaction is presented in the form of an antonym word): day - night, black - white;
3. consonance (rhyme): color - light;
4. lexical-semantic group: vegetable - tomato, pepper;
5. part-whole relationship: house - room, day - hour;

An associative experiment helps to determine a person’s attitude to certain realities of the world around him and to identify a range of values ​​through an unconscious reaction to specific concepts, for example, politics, family, faith. As a result of such an experiment, positive, negative and neutral responses can be identified, which confirms that each participant has an individual experience that is either strongly associated with the national culture or completely unrelated to it.

At the same time, it should be noted that the associative network is considered not only from the point of view of psychology, but from the point of view of the linguistic structure, which reflects the connection by the grammatical structure of the language. Yu.N. Karaulov proposed the hypothesis that vocabulary, even in the human mind, exists only within the boundaries of grammar, and also that grammar is always associated with certain lexemes. Based on the experiment, it was established that the responses to reaction words were word forms or inflectional variants of the proposed words. Thus, it was concluded that all vocabulary in the human mind is displayed in the form of various word forms, which, in turn, represent the grammar of the language.

As a result of the study by Yu.N. Karaulov proposed a model of an associative-verbal network, within which the lexical and grammatical structure languages ​​are directly related to each other. All words in such a model are presented in the form of certain word forms that are part of larger sequences of such word forms in the human mind.

In the process of studying associative connections, various scientists (J. Miller, A.P. Klimenko, E. Bendix, I.A. Sternin) proposed various experimental methods that were supposed to most accurately identify verbal paradigms and consolidate lexical-semantic ones as the result of the study groups behind each stimulus word.

Experimental technique of directed associative experiment, proposed by A.P. Klimenko, is that a pair of words is offered as a stimulus, which together should generate one reaction, after which a new pair is formed based on the first words and the reaction received from the informant. In a certain cycle, the appearance of new pairs stops, in this case the LSG closes. This type of experiment is the most objective and reliable, as it shows which components are the core and which represent the periphery of the lexical-semantic group. However, there is a danger that if the choice of a new pair is unsuccessful, the LSG may close much earlier and not include some elements.

Exist different techniques identifying semantic components, within which free and directed methods of conducting an associative experiment are distinguished. The free associative experiment is based on the theory of J. Miller, who talks about the “predicative nature of associations,” which indicates the obligatory predicative connection of words associated with each other. The response in such an experiment is not intentionally provoked, since the initial stimuli are presented without any restrictions and special conditions for searching for a response. The results of such an experiment can be used as material for identifying lexical-semantic connections: integral, differential semes and for seme analysis. In this case, only those frequency reactions are used that are directly related to the stimulus word and do not reflect figurative meaning or meaning associated with other automatically occurring responses, such as cultural concepts.

A directed associative experiment is distinguished by the presence of certain restrictions in the presentation of the answer by informants. In many cases, a person is asked to give a subjective definition of a word; for this, a specific scheme can be used X is (cat is) or by the way - the stimulus can be asked a question (forest - what kind?). This method of conducting an associative experiment significantly narrows the range of possible semantic elements and grammatical structures that are presented in the answer. If in a free associative experiment the reaction can be absolutely any word, then in a directed experiment participants are most often asked to give subjective verbal definitions [see. Popova, Sternin 2009: 7]. The latter method quite accurately identifies the nuclear seme, taking into account the most frequent reactions. A directed experiment provokes a reaction that is primarily associated with the core semantic components, while a free experiment does not have such a goal and often reflects the periphery of the semantics of a word.

Some types of associative experiments are based on the use of lexical-grammatical constructions as settings, in which the word under study is presented either as a comparative element or as an oppositional one. During the experiment, people work with entire combinations of words, but this does not prevent them from highlighting the components of interest, since they will be the core of the entire phrase. Words in this case can belong to completely different semantic groups, since, perceiving the proposed phrase in general, as a situation, a person reacts depending on exclusively individual experience, not limited by accepted lexical-grammatical connections.

The field of association studies has been widely studied since different points vision and is often used as a method in the analysis of various lexical components. The uniqueness of the associative experiment is that it is able to identify those elements of semantics that cannot be obtained in other cases. Mass reactions represent a certain fixed norm, which reflects cultural, temporal, age and other characteristics and becomes a guideline when studying individual semantic components.

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 threefold aspect of linguistic phenomena and on experiment in linguistics.” The scientist believed that “a language system, that is, a dictionary and grammar,” can be derived from “relevant texts, that is, from corresponding linguistic material.” In his opinion, it is absolutely obvious that no other method exists and cannot exist when applied 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 community; they then cease to develop and adapt to the expression of new concepts and their nuances; what can be called the language-creative process ceases in them.

The situation 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 “the researcher of living languages ​​must act differently.”

“The researcher,” wrote Shcherba, “must also proceed from one way or another understood linguistic material. But, having built some abstract system from the facts of this material, it is necessary to test it against new facts, that is, to see whether the facts deduced from it correspond to reality. Thus, principle I is introduced into linguistics experiment. Having made any assumption about the meaning of this or that word, this or that form, about this or that rule of word formation or formation, etc., you should try to see if it is possible | to connect the series various forms applying this rule."

Shcherba also wrote that the experiment can have both positive \ positive and negative results. Negative results indicate either the incorrectness of the postulated rule, or the need for some of its restrictions, or the fact that there is no longer a rule, but 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 language material to a native speaker, without relying only on his intuition. Moreover, he believed that this kind of experiment is already carried out in nature, when a child is learning. talking or when an adult is studying foreign language, or in pathology, when speech decay 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 “blunders” are associated with a poor sense of language. It is noteworthy that at the same time Freud wrote about slips of the tongue and mishearings, interpreting this in the paradigm of psychoanalysis. At the same time, by experiment in linguistics Shcherba means | involved: 1) introspection, self-observation and 2) setting up the experiment itself. He wrote about the principle of experiment as important point, which allows you to gain a deeper understanding of human speech activity. Since he wrote this in the third years 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. Thus, in addition to what has been said, Shcherba added: “With a very common fear that with this method K the “individual speech system” will be studied, and not the linguistic one 127

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

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

1. The materials of the experiments are very interesting, but who knows what the subjects can say on the instructions of the experimenter? How can one prove that the experiment actually reveals language rules?

2. The experiment creates deliberately artificial situations, which is not typical for the natural functioning of language and speech.

3. Spontaneous speech sometimes reveals something that no experiment can organize, i.e. the possibilities of experimental techniques are quite limited.

Sugar believed that these questions can be answered as follows:

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

2. Although experimental situations can be artificial, the fundamental features of speech activity revealed in the experiment are characteristic of speech activity in other, non-experimental situations. Draw a clear line between typical and atypical, natural and artificial situations it is forbidden.

3. An 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 the speech and non-speech contexts, the general conditions of the activity, the communicant’s intentions, and the state of the communication participants are taken into account.

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

An important feature of psycholinguistics is the appeal to the meaning of a 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 figures of speech or grammatical forms. Psycholinguistics distinguishes between objective and subjective semantics. The first is a semantic system of language meanings, the second is represented 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 those belonging to the semantic components of vocabulary, taken in an abstract-logical (objective) sense. The psycholinguistic concept of “semantic field” is a collection of words along 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

The associative experiment is the most developed technique for psycholinguistic analysis of semantics.

2.1. Association experiment procedure. Subjects are presented with a list of words and told that they need to answer with the first words that come to mind. Typically, each subject is given 100 words and 7-10 minutes to answer. Majority reactions, given in associative dictionaries, received from students 128129

universities and colleges aged 17-25 years, for whom the language incentives is native.

There are several types of associative experiments:

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

2. Directed associative experiment. The person being tested before
is supposed to give associations of a certain grammatical or se
mantic class (for example, choose an adjective for a creature
telny).

3. Chain associative experiment. The subjects were offered
fails to respond to stimulus several associations - for example,
give 10 reactions within 20 seconds.

There are special dictionaries of associative norms; the well-known one 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 “Dictionary of associative norms of the Russian language,” ed. A.A. Leontyev (Moscow, 1977).

Currently, 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: volume 1. Direct dictionary: from stimulus to response; v. 2. Reverse dictionary: from reaction to stimulus; v. 3-6 are also straight lines and reverse dictionaries two other word lists. There are 1277 stimuli in this dictionary, which is not much. less quantity words that are used by speakers in everyday speech (1500-3000); 12,600 different words were recorded as responses, and in total there were 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, arranged in descending order of frequency (indicated by a number). Within groups, reactions follow in alphabetical order (5):

(5) FOREST...field, trees 11, autumn, big, birch 7, etc.
At the end of each article there are numbers (6):

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

The first number indicates the total number of reactions to the stimuli, the second - the number of different reactions, the third - the number of subjects who left this stimulus without a response, i.e. number of failures. The fourth is the number of single answers, i.e. reactions that

were given only once and whose frequency is, respectively, equal to unity.

2.2. Interpretation of responses from an associative experiment. Eat
many possibilities for interpreting the results of associative exp.
rimenta. Without going into scientific disputes, let's look at some of them.

When analyzing the responses of an associative experiment, we distinguish, first of all, syntagmatic (7) and paradigmatic (8) associations:

(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 the stimulus words. They obey the principle of “minimal contrast”, according to which the less the stimulus words differ from the reaction words in the composition of semantic components, the higher the likelihood of the reaction word being 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 generated for the word contains a number of features similar to those contained in the stimulus word (9).

Native speaker reactions can be restored quite easily stimulus(in case (9) this is holidays).

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

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

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

(10) animal - cat, table - furniture

(11) house- Tom, mouse- book

(12) master - golden hands, guest- stone

(13) man - I have to

2.3. The significance of the results of the association experiment. Asso
tion experiment is widely known and actively used in psy
cholinguistics, psychology, sociology, psychiatry.

The results of the associative experiment can be used, first of all, in various areas of 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 reaction words to

every word is a stimulus. In this case, it will be possible to calculate 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 the associations given on them. 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 in linguistics - synonymy. So, if you need to determine the degree of similarity between words that have similar meaning(14), then you can interview different people and each will imagine this similarity differently. Yes, for someone Job will be similar to case, but for some work. You can also ask 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 coincide. It may turn out that some pairs of words are “closer” to each other than others. (In this case, the closest couple was work - labor, followed by a couple case- Job, and then labor is business). Thus, a survey of a large number of subjects using an associative experiment will show the measure of semantic proximity between these words. (14) work, labor, business

Sometimes this kind of data coincides with the results of distributive-statistical analysis of texts, when researchers do not resort to experiment, but conduct an independent count of word combinations (the so-called distribution). An associative experiment makes it possible to find out how the fragments of linguistic consciousness are structured among native speakers.

At one time, J. Deese tried to reconstruct the semantic composition of a word based on an associative experiment. Matrices semantic distances He subjected secondary associations to the stimulus word (i.e., associations to associations) to the factor analysis procedure. The identified factors received a meaningful interpretation and acted as semantic components of meaning. A.A. Leontyev, commenting on Deese’s results, believed that they clearly show the very possibility of identifying, on the basis of formal processing of data from 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.

Precisely because during an 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
ka 39, poor 34, correspondence student 28, cheerful 20, young, good 18,
bad 16, scholarship 14, exam I, applicant, martyr,
teacher 10, eternal hunger, wine, hunger, go
Loden, great times, psychosis, five years of rest - two
twenty minutes of shame 1.

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

In this regard, it should be noted that the main advantage of the associative experiment is its simplicity and ease of use, since it can be carried out with a large group of subjects at the same time. Subjects work with the meaning of a word in the “mode of use,” which allows them to identify some unconscious components of the meaning. So, according to the results of the experiment, it turns out that in the word exam in the consciousness of native speakers of the Russian language (and, accordingly, culture) there is such psychological moment this word, like difficult, fear, scary, difficult(16). It is not found in linguistic dictionaries.

(16) EXAM(626 people) - difficult 87, pass 48, pass 35,
session 26, test 21, ticket 18, soon 17, math 13, on
Abitur, fear 10, scary 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 mentally retarded subjects.

Some reactions (18) can be interpreted as both semantic and phonetic. They are most often given to subjects who are tired or mentally retarded.

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

Most of the associations are due to speech cliches. Moreover, associations also reflect various aspects of the subject’s native culture (18) and textual reminiscences (19).

(18) area- Red

(19) master - Margarita

It is important to note that the plan of verbal associations is not completely isomorphic to the plan of subject relations. For example, in the experiments of the 30s by Karwosky and Dorcus, it was shown that colors are associated differently than the words denoting them (along with words that name colors, subjects were presented with cards of different colors). In other words, in the minds of the subjects, the colors themselves are associated somewhat differently than the words denoting them.

The associative experiment is of particular importance for psychologists, since it is one of the oldest techniques of experimental psychology. George Miller very vividly describes the history of this technique. Sir Francis Galton, English scientist and cousin Charles Darwin was the first to try 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 at a time and looked at them. He kept track of time on a chronometer, starting from the moment his eyes rested on a word, and ending with the moment when the word he read evoked two different thoughts in him. He wrote down these thoughts for each word on the list, but refused to publish the results. “They expose,” Galton wrote, “the essence human thought with such amazing clarity and authenticity that it would hardly be possible to preserve them if they were published and made available 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 were standardized on a large number of mentally healthy individuals, and the proportion of non-standard speech reactions (their relationship with standard ones) was determined. These data make it possible to determine the degree of eccentricity and unusual thinking of specific subjects.

Associative field Each person has his own composition of names and the strength of connections between them. The actualization of one or another connection in the answer is not accidental and may even depend on the situation (20). There is no doubt that the level of a person’s education influences the structure of his mental lexicon. So , associative experiments on the material of the Russian and Estonian languages ​​revealed that persons with higher technical education more often give paradigmatic associations, and those with a humanitarian education - syntagmatic ones.

(20) friend - Bear

The nature of associations is affected by age, geographical conditions, and a person’s profession. According to A.A. Leontyev, 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).

(21) brush- mountain ash

(22) brush - grapes

brush - smooth, brush- soft

hand - amputation

hair brush 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 a given language (26, 27, 28). According to 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. Thus, when associations to the same stimuli were compared, it turned out that the three most frequent reactions to the stimulus word in 1910 on average accounted for approximately 46% of all responses, and in 1954 - already about 60% of all responses, those. the most common reactions became much more frequent. This means that as a result of standard education, the spread of television and other means of mass communication, the stereotyping of reactions has increased, people began to think more alike.

3. Semantic differential method

Method semantic differential(semantic differential - from Greek semantikos - meaning and Latin differentia - difference) belongs to the methods of psycholinguistics and experimental psychosemantics. It serves to construct subjective semantic spaces and belongs to scaling methods. The latter are used in psychology to obtain quantitative indicators to assess attitudes towards certain objects. The object in this case can be both physical and social processes. In psycholinguistics, words can be objects of study. Semantic differential in psycholinguistics, it 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 antonymic adjectives.

The procedure for conducting an experiment using this technique is as follows. Subjects a word is presented and they must mark the number that matches their idea of ​​the word. Each scale has a gradation from +3 to -3 or simply 7