Cognitive Processing of the Russian Language Binomials in Turkic-Russian Bilinguas

The article concerns one of the aspects of bilingualism, namely the study of cognitive processing of lexical units in bilinguals. As a review of the scientific literature shows, the bilingual mental lexicon differs from the monolingual mental lexicon. In the latter, words do not exist separately, but together with colocational links, i.e. in conjunction with other words of the lexicon. Such an organization is reflected in the speech of native speakers, which is built from ready-made, multicomponent, often phraseological units. The presence in speech of units that do not require combining, extracted from the mental vocabulary in a ready-made form, indicates the high level of collocation competence. The processing of multicomponent units also differs among native speakers and bilinguals. This article continues the series of works devoted to the study of the class of multicomponent nominative units of the Russian language called binomials. The article presents the results of a cognitive experiment measuring the reaction time in a group of Turkic-Russian bilinguals. At the previous stage of the study, this experiment was conducted in a group of native Russian speakers. Taking into account the fact that cognitive processing in native speakers and bilingual individuals is different, the fact that was proved by foreign colleagues, it was decided to conduct an experiment in a monolingual group and a bilingual group in order to compare the nature of cognitive processing, to reveal its similarities and differences. The hypothesis about the influence of the factors of collocability, the frequency and word order, as well as the type of bilingualism on the processing speed of binomials of the Russian language was tested. Binomials are understood as composed nominative reproducible units with a two-words structure, for example, day and night, mom and dad, men and women, black and white, etc. The design and procedure of the experiment were identical to those applied to a group of native speakers of the Russian language. An experiment with two controlled variables was developed in the E-prime 2.0 programme. The variables were collocability factors, i.e. frequency and word order. Each variable had two levels: frequency high / low, word order normal / inverted. 60 binomials (30 high-frequency and 30 low-frequency) and 10 fillers, phrases that were similar in structure to binomials but not registered in the National Russian Language Corpus, were used as stimulus material. The word order was altered in half of the units in both frequency groups, for example, instead of the binomial of a men and a women, in the experiment the phrase women and a men appeared. Participants of the experiment were asked to answer the question about the correctness of word order in each unit that appeared on the screen. The subsequent analysis took into account the response time (RT). Khakass-Russian and Tatar-Russian bilinguals participated in the experiment, a total of 20 people. For analysis, they were combined into one group on the basis of similarities in the type of bilingualism and language experience. To analyse the results, we used the analysis of variance with repeated measurements (Repeated measures ANOVA). The analysis revealed that the main effects of frequency and word order are preserved in the bilingual group, as well as in the group of native speakers with a general slowdown in the reaction rate. The shortest reaction time is observed when processing high-frequency binomials with a normal word order (1,410 ms), The longest RT is observed when processing low-frequency binomials with a reversed word order (1,760 ms). The processing speed of low-frequency binomials with a normal word order is close to the processing speed of low-frequency binomials with a reversed order of components (1700 ms and 1,760 ms respectively), i.e., the word order factor is less significant than the frequency factor when processing binomials in bilingual group. In general, we can conclude that the fact that Russian is not a native language in the group of Turkic-Russian bilinguals, although its dominance in everyday communication is observed, leads to the fact that binomials are processed by respondents of this group more slowly than by native speakers, and changing the word order in binomials does not play a role when processing binomials with a low frequency index. However, it should be noted that the pattern of binomial processing in bilinguals is identical to the principle of processing by native speakers. We can conclude that the nature of the natural bilingualism of the representatives of this group implies the development of collocational links in their mental lexicon, and, consequently, collocation competence at the level of native speakers.

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