engleski

Studying associations in multilinguals: A cross-linguistic study

In the literature on mental lexicon, associations are used as the best solution to inspect that elusive human mechanism. Researchers have until recently mostly opted for studies based on data from the mother tongue of participants, but language and, therefore, cultural communities are nowadays perceived as “melting pots” and they are mostly multilingual due to different cultural backgrounds of their members. Due to that influence, this thesis aims to explore associations and mental lexicon organisation of multilingual speakers of Croatian, English and Russian. Associations questionnaires have been used to collect data which has further been statistically analysed and explained in terms of associative fields and conceptualisation overlaps caused by typological closeness of languages at large. Based on a review of the literature on linguistic culturology, the shared Slavic etymology and tradition that Croatian and Russian languages possess shapes the way in which speakers form their linguistic picture of the world. Analysis of the responses has shown similarities in the ways in which participants form conceptualisations in all three languages as well as the importance of the proficiency level, but the sample size used in this study is only indicative. Тherefore, further research is needed to identify other factors that could strengthen the findings obtained from this study.

mental lexicon ; linguistic culturology ; linguistic picture of the world ; associative field ; conceptualisation

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