The Emotionality of the Diminutive in the Mental lexicon of the Russian Native Speaker and the Turkic-Russian Bilingual

This article presents the results of a study on identifying the status of the emotional component in the structure of the mental lexicon of Turkic-Russian bilinguals and native speakers of Russian in relation to other psycholinguistic parameters, and the influence of these components on cognitive processing. The correlation of emotionality and such components as evaluation (correlated with the valence parameter), word frequency, age of acquisition, and contextual implementation is studied. The problem set in the study is solved with the help of the questionnaire method using the scaling technique (the seven-point Lik-ert scale). During the experiments, the participants were asked to evaluate lexical units on a scale from 1 to 7 according to the following parameters: power of emotion (which, as the author believes, corresponds to the psycholinguistic parameter arousal); type of evaluation (correlated with the parameter valence); typical usage contexts: (a) the word is most often used in conversations about a child or an adult, (b) the word is most often used in conversations with a child or an adult; word frequency; age of acquisition of the word. The total number of the stimuli in the questionnaires is 371, of which 163 units are non-derivative words, 166 are diminutives formed from non-derivative words, and 42 are fillers-groups of words with positive and negative meanings. The study was conducted in three stages. The article presents the results of the last two and compares the results with each other. At the second stage, the participants were Russian native speakers aged 18 to 71. At the third stage, the participants were the Turkic-Russian bilinguals, aged 16 to 73, all the respondents called one of the Turkic languages (Shor, Khakass, Tatar) their native language. Using the nonparametric Spearman correlation coefficient of the STATISTICA software package, similar correlations of diminutive lexemes' emotional semantics with the selected psycholin-guistically relevant parameters were revealed in comparison with other groups of emotional and neutral vocabulary in both groups of subjects. The analysis of the diminutives using the Kruskal-Wallis criterion for Russian native speakers and Turkic-Russian bilinguals showed that the diminutives significantly differ in all the studied parameters from other groups of emotional and neutral vocabulary. The analysis in the two groups of subjects allows suggesting that they both have similar sensitivity to the emotional and the related factors, and the differences within the groups are identical. The author believes that the obtained results may be related mainly to the type of the studied bilingualism-natural with the dominance of a second language. This fact determines the correlations between emotionality and the related psycholinguistic categories in the bilingual participants, which is consistent with the available data that emotional associations are usually established in childhood. It also explains similar data obtained in both groups of participants-Russian native speakers and Turkic-Russian bilinguals.

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