The Influence of the Semiotic Type of Stimuli on the Extraction of Information from Language Consciousness
The contemporary communicative environment is mostly visual, which means that traditional linguistic techniques of concept formation studies have to be revised. The concept COVID-19 pandemic has been unfolding in the language consciousness of the global community for about three years. It is valuable material for a psycholinguistic experiment since it allows researchers to study the initial stage of concept formation, whereas associative experiments based on words that denote familiar phenomena or concepts are strongly affected by linguo-cultural environment. The present psycholinguistic experiment features a modified continuous associative test based on the concept COVID-19 with a total of 1,122 verbal reactions. The experiment consisted of three parts and involved 100 respondents. The first test featured the verbal stimulus “coronavirus infection (COVID-19)” and produced 356 reactions; the second one was based on a media-popularized image of the virus (380 reactions), and the third one introduced a combined visual-verbal stimulus (386), i.e. a picture and its verbal description. The obtained data were processed with the help of the semantic gestalt method developed by Yu. N. Karaulov. In the first test, featuring the verbal stimulus, the respondents tried to disclose the essence of the phenomenon, while in the second test the visual stimulus triggered associations with shape and appearance. The third visual-verbal stimulus produced more neutral reactions. These results confirm the assumption that the visual stimulus is mostly related to shape, color, texture, and other physical characteristics. The verbal stimulus evoking mostly negative associations, confirms the direct connection of the verbal stimulus and the essence of the phenomenon (the referent). So, the concept COVID-19 finds the following description in the linguistic worldview of Russian youth: coronavirus is a dangerous lethal disease that causes much fear, is characterized by fever, cough and loss of smell and can be prevented by such measures as wearing face masks, quarantine, self-isolation, social distancing, and using QR-codes. The virus resembles a planet, a ball, a flower or a fungus. The modified verbal-visual continuous associative test proved to have an increased information potential, which provides a greater amount of linguo-cognitive information than the conventional experiment based on a verbal stimulus.