The Influence of Bilingualism on Emotional Words Cognitive Processing (Turkic-Russian Bilingualism)

The aim of this article is to identify the presence or absence of differences in the cognitive processing of diminutives in native Russian speakers and Turkic-Russian bilinguals. The problem set in the study is solved using a behavioral experiment with measuring subject's reaction time to the presented objects, i.e., the reaction time is a dependent variable in the design. An independent variable is a type of stimulus emotionality with four levels: non-emotional words, emotional words with diminutive suffixes, emotional words with positive and negative evaluation. Categorization was used as a task. The total number of the stimuli in the experiment was 371: 163 units are non-derivative words, 166 are diminutives formed from non-derivative words, and 42 are groups of words with positive and negative evaluation. The study was conducted in two stages. At the first stage, the respondents were native Russian speakers, 23 people (9 men, 14 women) aged 18 to 53. At the second stage, the respondents were Turkic-Russian bilinguals, 23 people (10 men, 13 women) aged 16 to 52, natural bilinguals, whose native language is one of the Turkic language: Shor, Khakass, or Tatar. The results of the experiment were analyzed using the STATISTICA and SPSS Statistics packages. For the analysis the ANCOVA covariance analysis was used. The analysis of the obtained data showed that the cognitive processing of diminutives differs from the cognitive processing of neutral units in both native Russian speakers and in Turkic-Russian bilinguals. Russian speakers are influenced by the word frequency factor, while Turkic-Russian bilinguals are influenced by the frequency and length of the word. It is reflected in the reaction time difference of response to these stimuli. In addition, native speakers of Russian in general process words faster than bilingual subjects. A correlation analysis was performed to identify the peculiarities of reaction time interaction with psycholinguistic parameters (frequency, power of emotion, type of evaluation, and contextual correlation). A nonpara-metric Spearman correlation coefficient was used for the analysis. The analyzed data showed that the reaction time interacts with other psycholinguistic parameters: frequency and power of emotion in two groups of subjects, contextual correlation in native Russian speakers. In the author's opinion, the differences are mainly explained by the typological differences of languages, as well as by the type of the studied lexical units and their special position in the Russian and Turkic languages. But, on the other hand, the same principles of processing emotional and neutral units suggest that the type of bilingualism-early unbalanced with the dominance of the second language-still has an impact, which correlates with the data obtained earlier.

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