Experimental Research of Feminitives Comprehension (Data Quantitative Analysis Results)

Abstract

The article reveals some results of an experimental research which have been conducted within the psycholinguistic concept of the word meaning. Russian feminitives were chosen as the object of the study due to their nowaday increasing actuality. Indeed, a noticeable burst in female-nominating nouns creation has lately been observed. Thus, functioning of such female nominations meanings seems to be a new and prospective direction of linguistic researches. Having studying identification strategies and mechanisms of the given feminintives meanings as a goal we staged a psycholinguistic experiment. In order to reach the goal the tasks of the cue words frequency and apprehensibility determination and the degree of their foregrounding research were solved. The planning and course of the experiment as well as the results of the first stage of the experimental data processing are described in the present article. The mentioned stage comprised the counting of the responses the experiment participants had given, when asked to identify the cue words as known or unknown and estimate the degree of their meanings transparency. The percentage ratios of the familiar and unfamiliar words are presented in tables. Based upon these figures, several conclusions were arrived at. In particular, only 20 % of the cue words are known to the half of the experiment participants. But for all that almost 90 % of the respondents agreed upon the least comprehensible feminitive as such. Besides, against our expectations, the young people didn’t show a better comprehension and identification of the recent women nomination compared to the nouns which had been picked out from the long-time dictionaries.