RuTurkPsychLing database as a specialized lexicographic source: Norms for evaluating psychophysiological and emotional experience

The article presents a psycholinguistic database (DB) RuTurkPsychLing - a dictionary of a special type, which differs both in the type of information provided about lexemes and in the nature of collecting and organizing the information. The dictionary includes information about lexical units obtained using psycholinguistic methods and intended for use primarily in cognitive and psycholinguistic research. Dictionary data are organized using database technology to improve the efficiency of extracting and analyzing the dictionary data. The purpose of RuTurkPsychLing is to present normative data on the evaluation of words of the Russian language and two Turkic languages - Tatar and Khakass - according to the following parameters: “familiarity”, “temperature”, “location in space”, “size”, “emotionality” and “manipulability”. The DB correlates with the theoretical basis and methods of collecting material with local DBs created in the Tomsk State University Linguistic Anthropology Lab -RuWordPerception and TurkWordPerception. Combining the evaluations of Russian words given by Russian L1 speakers and Turkic-Russian bilinguals allows obtaining evidence of the influence of the bilingual mental lexicon on the perception of words; evaluation of equal concepts in native languages by three groups of participants will provide an empirical basis for the theoretical provisions of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. The article describes the questionnaire procedure, methods and overall analysis of the collected data. The RuTurkPsychLing DB includes 364,155 ratings given by 100 native Russian speakers; 74,320 evaluations of Russian and Tatar words given by 16 Tatar-Russian bilinguals; 371,200 evaluations of Russian and Khakass words, given by 34 Khakass-Russian bilinguals. Participants rate the contribution of the parameters to the semantics as low, except for the relationship with emotionality (the mean score is from 3.78 to 4.06 out of 7). According to the data collected in the project, the contribution of perceptual components to the semantics of randomly sampled words is extremely small. Perceptual components of size, position in space, temperature, emotionality and manipulability do not appear in the entire lexicon, but in specific semantic scopes. Comparison of ratings given by bilinguals in Russian and in their native language shows the common ratio. However, the native speakers of Tatar significantly differed in their evaluations of the Russian words in terms of the warm/cold parameter, the difference retained while evaluating the Tatar words, but manifested itself to a lesser extent. The materials of the psycholinguistic DB can be used to test existing hypotheses, to generate new hypotheses, to establish new patterns in the field of cognitive processing of units of the native and acquired languages, and to cross-validate the results of other studies, both psycholinguistic and proper linguistic. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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