2. The main provisions of the psycholinguistic theory of speech activity

Lecture



The main provisions of the psycholinguistic theory can be expressed in the form of the following postulates (AA Leontiev, 1997, 2003, etc.).

- Like any other human activity, speech activity includes:

need, motive, purpose, purpose, installation, knowledge (culturological, proper language, and appeal to them);

• a multilateral analysis of the situation in which an activity is to occur and occurs;

deciding whether or not to carry out activities and choose the best means for carrying out activities for a given situation (forms of speech, their variants and linguistic means proper: phonetic, syntactic, lexical, etc.);

• activity planning (at different levels of awareness of the results of planning) and the prediction of its possible result (acceptor of the result of action according to P. K. Anokhin [3]);

production (execution) of certain actions and operations;

• current control over the committed activity and its correction (if it is necessary);

• final comparison of the result of an activity with its purpose (design).

- The units of psycholinguistic analysis are elementary speech action and speech operation (in the “limiting” version - an integral act of speech activity).

- These units should carry all the main signs of speech activity. These include: 1) the subject of the activity (focus on a particular subject); 2) purposefulness, since any act of activity is characterized by an ultimate goal, and any action is an intermediate goal, the achievement of which, as a rule, is predicted by the subject; 3) motivation (in this case, the act of human activity, according to AA. Leontiev, is, as a rule, polymotivated, i.e. it is prompted by several motives that are merged into a single whole); 4) the hierarchical organization of activities, including the hierarchical organization of its units, and 5) the phase organization of activities. Thus, in the concept of the Moscow psycholinguistic school, units of psycholinguistic analysis are distinguished and characterized in the “activity paradigm” (133, p. 65).

- The organization of speech activity is based on the "heuristic principle" (that is, it provides for the choice of the "strategy" of speech behavior). According to AA Leontiev, the psycholinguistic theory of speech activity should “a) provide a link in which the choice of a strategy of speech behavior would be made; b) allow different ways of operating with a statement at certain stages of the generation (perception) of speech; c) finally, do not contradict the experimental results obtained earlier on the material of various psycholinguistic models built on a different theoretical basis "(ibid., p. 67). The activity of the subject in relation to the surrounding reality is mediated by the reflection of this reality (137).

According to A.A. Leontyev, any psychological theory of speech activity should investigate, first of all, the relationship of the language-mediated image of the world of man and speech activity as a communicative activity. Based on this, the psycholinguistic theory combines an activity approach and an imaging approach. In the structure of human activity, mapping appears primarily as an indicative link. Accordingly, in the structure of speech activity, the subject of psycholinguistics research should be a stage (phase) of orientation, the result of which is the choice of an appropriate generation strategy or speech perception, as well as a planning stage involving the use of memory images (133, p. 69).

- The choice of one or another way of implementing an activity already represents “modeling the future” (133, p. 70). According to N.A.Bernshteyn, it is “possible only by extrapolating what is selected by the brain from information about the current situation, from the“ fresh traces ”of immediately preceding perceptions, from the whole previous experience of the individual, finally, from those active trials and probes, which belong to the class of actions that are still extremely summarily designated as “indicative reactions” (19, p. 290). Such pre-tuning to actions, based on past experience, can be called probabilistic forecasting (228, pp. 127–128.) In speech activity, probabilistic forecasting plays a very important role.


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Psycholinguistics

Terms: Psycholinguistics