COGNITIVE PROCESSING OF AN EXPRESSIVE WORD: GENDER SPECIFICITY

Abstract

The paper describes results of experimental studies of Russian expressive words processing by men and women. The objective of this study is revealing the dependence of the processing of an expressive word by men and women on the features of their reference to animate vs. inanimate objects, men vs. women. The authors used the program E-Prime 2.0 (Copyright 1996-2012 Psychology Software Tools). The subjects performed three types of tasks (lexical decision task, categorization task and reading comprehension task) in our experiments. The authors manipulated a set of stimuli parameters step-by-step: 1) presence vs. lack of emotional evaluation (or other type of expressiveness) in the semantics of the word (plat'itse [small and good dress], kolentse [small knee and good attitude of the speaker], kopytse [small hoof and good attitude of the speaker] vs. prokachka [pumping], raskachka [swaying], solonka [salt shaker]); 2) type of emotional evaluation (positive vs. negative): schast'itse [happiness and good attitude of the speaker], rechen 'ka [river and good attitude of the speaker], papen'ka [dad and good attitude of the speaker] vs. mebelishka [furniture and speaker's contemptuous attitude], reporterishko [reporter and speaker's contemptuous attitude],pidzhachishko [jacket and speaker's contemptuous attitude]; 3) type of expressiveness: evaluation vs. the degree of manifestation of feature (dorozhen'ka [road and good attitude of the speaker] vs. nabukhat'sya [to drink alcohol beyond measure], shchekastyy [with big cheeks]); 4) the position of the stimulus in the context: isolated stimulus vs. stimulus in a minimal context (vzbesit'sya [to get mad, angry], sfotografirovat'sya [take a picture of oneself] vs. on vchera razozhralsya [he was eating a lot yesterday and the speaker emphasizes this], ona vchera uvolilas' [she quit yesterday]; 5) the position of the stimulus in the experimental task: the target stimulus vs. priming position. Nouns, verbs and adjectives were used as stimuli in the experiments; however, the influence of the grammatical characteristics of the word was not the subject of the study. The stimuli were aligned in literal and syllabic lengths. The degree of expressiveness, the psychological reality of the evaluative semantics of the stimuli for Russian speakers, subjective frequency were tested in a series of pretests. From 20 to 30 people took part in each survey. Students of different faculties of Tomsk universities (TSU, TPU), aged 17 to 23, took part in the experiments. Each experiment involved 44 participants, an equal number of men and women. The experiments were conducted at different times, various groups of participants were involved. In all four experiments, the authors obtained data only on the lack of a statistically significant asymmetry in the rate of cognitive processing of expressive stimuli by men and women. The main significant result of the experimental studies is statistically reliable data that differences in the processing of expressive stimuli by men and women are manifested in situations of interaction of the word expressiveness and the type of its reference. The animacy vs. inanimacy of the name and, to a greater extent, the reference of the attribute or action denoted by the expressive word to the man and the woman reveal statistical significance. Men and women cognitively process the expressive name in different ways when it refers to a man or a woman. The authors emphasize that this mutual influence manifests itself in a position where the expressive word is not in the zone of the subject's voluntary attention. These conclusions directly correlate with the results of experimental studies of the gender peculiarity of processing metaphorical names of men and women obtained earlier. PU - Tomsk State University PA - 634050 Lenina, 36, Tomsk, Russia