THE MENTAL LEXICON OF A POETIC AUTHOR IN A TEMPORAL PERSPECTIVE: THE CASE OF POLINA SINYOVA

Abstract

The series of psycholinguistic experiments consists of a free associative experiment, a directed associative experiment, a free definition task, and a semantic word grouping task. These experiments were conducted with the Voronezh poet Polina Sinyova in two stages, with a five-year interval between them. The experimental data obtained, which serve as the empirical material of the study, make it possible to model the author’s lexicon in the form of an associative-verbal network that includes the associative fields of each word from the experimental list. Several parameters of a word’s associative field prove to be significant for the study, including its volume and the degree to which markemes are involved in constructing associative chains that constitute these fields. In addition, particular attention is paid to the degree of stability of the participant’s responses across the delayed experiments and to the correlation between response stability and the status of stimulus words, that is, whether they are markemes or non-markemes. A comparison of the psycholinguistic data obtained at the two stages of the study, conducted with a five-year interval, as well as a comparison of the associative fields modeled on the basis of the first and second experimental stages, demonstrates that the stability of verbal associative responses is determined by several factors. The preservation of word pairs is observed primarily in experiments involving the creation of symptom texts. This tendency is most clearly manifested in the task aimed at formulating free definitions. In experiments aimed at grouping words, associative connections tend to deteriorate over time: none of the thematic groups formed by the participant were reproduced five years later, and pairs of similars and opposites were reproduced only to a limited extent. Paradigmatic relations between word pairs at the stimulus–response level prove to be more stable than syntagmatic ones. In the free associative experiment and in the experiment employing the method of free definitions, where the majority of verbal associations are paradigmatic, more coinciding responses across the two stages of the study are observed than in the directed associative experiment, in which associations are predominantly syntagmatic. The nature of the stimulus word also proves to be a significant factor. Markemes demonstrate the greatest temporal stability of verbal associations, as evidenced by the results of both the free and directed associative experiments, as well as by the data obtained through the method of free definitions. Markemes that are most actively involved as “switches” and “closers” in the construction of the associative-verbal network retain the most stable associative responses over time. The volumes of associative fields of words, both markemes and non-markemes, change over the five-year interval.