Cognitive Processing of Binomials in the Russian Language (An Experimental Study)

The article presents the results of an experimental study of the Russian language binomials cognitive processing in two groups of native speakers. Binomials are a sequence of two words belonging to one part of speech located at the same level of the syntactic hierarchy and, as a rule, connected by a lexical element, in most cases by the conjunction "and" (Russian "i"). Binomials can be found in a great number of languages, for example, in English: day and night, up and down; in Spanish: cuerpo y alma, capa y espa-da; and in Russian: muzh i zhena, ya i ty, etc. At the previous stages of the study, a list of 128 binomials was compiled. All the units from the list were ranked by the degree of frequency. Along with the frequency, using the methodology of foreign colleagues, all 128 binomials were placed on the (ir)reversibility scale (based on the data from the Russian language corpus). Each unit received its coefficient from 50 (reversible) to 100 (irreversible). At this stage of the study, binomials are considered as units of the mental lexicon. Their processing is in the focus of interest. It is believed that binomials are processed holistically, i.e. as a word. The main method applied for the investigation of processing of multicomponent units is an experiment. It was decided to replicate experiments conducted on the material of the English language in Russian. The author hypothesized that a change in the word order and frequency would affect the speed of cognitive processing in native speakers, i.e. when decreasing the frequency and changing the word order, the processing speed would decrease, and changing the word order would have a particularly strong influence on the processing speed of the binomial in units with a high irreversibility coefficient. The author also assumed that living in a foreign language environment would affect the processing speed. Using the E-Prime software, an experiment was developed, with 30 frequent units and 30 infrequent binomials as stimuli. Word order was altered in half of the stimulus units. Two groups of native speakers took part in the experiment: Russians living on the territory of their mother tongue (30) and Russians living on the territory of a foreign language (14). Their task was to assess the correctness of the word order in the binomial shown on the screen. Further the reaction time was analyzed. The results show that Russian binomials may be processed holistically, as evidenced by the increase in reaction time when the word order is changed, that is, their integrity is broken. The frequency of the binomial also affects the speed of its processing: with decreasing frequency, there is a tendency to an increase in the reaction time. These statements are valid for both groups of respondents who took part in the experiment since the analysis of the obtained data revealed the same processing trends for the two groups. However, the response time of respondents with the dominance of a foreign language and permanently residing in the territory of a foreign language increases, which indicates a loss of automaticity in the processing of units of the native language.

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