Emotional semantics of occasionalisms in a psycholinguistic experiment

This article deals with the problem of occasional verbalization of emotional semantics of nonverbal signals by Mongolian-speaking persons in direct and inverse psycholinguistic experiment. The author of the article investigates the initial language nomination strategies of emotional constituents of musical phrases in a psycholinguistic experiment. On this234material an attempt is made to reveal the emotional semantics of sound-letters in Mongol. It proves the necessity of other series of experiments with pseudowords to exclude the influence of semantic meaning on the phonetic one in the course of a psycholinguistic experiment. Emotions like joy, happiness, fear, anger and sadness are recognized easier than other types. The emotions were categorized as negative, positive or neutral. People know more negative emotion words than positive or neutral ones. The proportion was 50% negative, 20% positive and 10% neutral words in the experiment. It is explained that positive emotions are processed schematically. People do not pay a lot of attention to assessment of positive emotions. In general, positive emotions signal that things are normal, so we process them more superficially. Negative emotions signal that something is wrong, and so they elicit a slowdown in processing. They require more attention and detail in thinking and, consequently, more words. We want to know if there are psychological differences between coincidence of recognizing negative and positive emotions in direct and reverse experiments. We found out that there are few emotion words, which probably makes good evolutionary sense, and that the proportion of negative words was larger than the positive ones and pseudowords for negative emotions were recognized more than the positive ones. Some participants, regardless of language, tended to use the same sets of words with limited diversity in their responses. Some of them had fewer identical words but far more diversity. The results of the proportions of verbalization of negative, positive and neutral emotional semantics show the possibility to study the problem in the future.

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