The Perceptual Component of Noun Semantics in the Perception of Native Russian Speakers and Turkic-Russian Bilinguals (Based on the RuWordPerception Psycholinguistic Database)

The article presents the results of one of the objectives of a research project studying the cognitive foundations of language interaction based on the material of Turkic-Russian language pairs. The problem being solved is based on the hypothesis of a possible biasing effect of the bilingual's mother tongue on the perception and cognitive processing of Russian language units. The problem is solved on the basis of materials created in the project of the RuWordPerception psycholinguistic database of native Russian speakers' and Turkic-Russian bilinguals' evaluations of the contribution of five perceptual modalities to the semantics of Russian nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The database and the project presented in the article are based on the theory of embodied knowledge. Its basic concept is that consciousness is embodied, integrated; the highest forms of world reflection, including language, are mediated by the experience of physical (bodily, practically effective) human interaction with the outside world. The hypothesis is verified that the meanings of notional words of different parts of speech have perceptual components, and the contribution of both the perceptual component and its subcomponents can fluctuate significantly. RuWordPerception includes information on evaluations of 200 nouns, 200 adjectives, and 200 verbs of the Russian language on their contribution to the formation of the semantics of five modalities of perception: vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. The results of the analysis in the article are based on a sample of evaluations on five modalities of perception of 200 Russian nouns. The evaluations were given by 46 Turkic-Russian bilinguals and 67 native Russian speakers. When solving these problems, the authors used the methods of statistical data processing in the R 3.3.1 programming language. Descriptive statistics show a significant system of similarity in the studied relation of evaluations by native Russian speakers and bilinguals. General tendencies are noted. The bias of the evaluation system in the direction of "less than the mean value": the mean values of evaluations of the modality of visual perception only by Russian speakers slightly exceed the mean value, more than 3.5 (3.773). The connections with visual (3.112) and tactile (3.112) perceptions approach mean values in bilinguals. As the results of the cluster analysis in Figs. 3 and 4 show, in assessing the contribution of the modalities of perception of Russian nouns in the groups L1-R and L1-T, both similarities (combining taste and smell modalities' contribution into one class, which corresponds to the previously obtained data) and differences are observed. The differences are manifested in the correlation of audio and visual modalities. In the group of native Russian speakers' evaluations, the evaluations of the contribution of visual modality are combined with the tactile one. Among Turkic-Russian bilinguals, visual modality forms a separate class, and tactile modality is combined with the audio one into one class.

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