Study of Changes in Language Ability Based on Data from a Word Association Test

Changes in the language ability of native speakers under the influence of the rapid development of technology and the transformation of the surrounding world is one of the urgent problems of modern psycholinguistics. The re-search material was the data of the Russian associative dictionary (late 80s - early 90s of the twentieth century) and the results of a free associative experiment presented in the multilingual associative thesaurus of politeness (2020). Within the framework of the theory of speech activity, the cue−target pair is considered as a speech action. According to the model of speech action developed by us, its essential components are methods and means of predication. The paper shows that significant changes have occurred in the structure of the associative fields "dog" of different fixation times, emphasizing the dynamics of the language ability of native speakers. The number of speech actions of the full syntactic cycle decreased by 26%, and the number of syntactic primitives and topic-comment structures increased by 10% and 16%, respectively, which indicates a decrease in the level of potential readiness to produce and perceive speech actions of the full syntactic cycle. Different hierarchy of structural components of the analyzed associative field demonstrate changes in the means of predication. The experimentally revealed reduction in the proportion of operational associates (-14%) and emotional-evaluative reactions (-26%) indicates a decrease in the importance of emotive and linguistic orienting points in the formation of associative links, and also diagnoses a decrease in the level of language competence. The increase in the share of conceptual reactions (+12%) and reactions-images (+28%) emphasizes the dominance of cognitive orienting points in the production of speech actions.