Correlation of the concepts DISEASE and CONGENITAL HEART DEFECT (CHD) in language consciousness of teenagers after heart surgery

Abstract

The article is the first of its kind to introduce the intersection of two significant concepts DISEASE and CONGENITAL HEART DEFECT (CHD) in the language consciousness of 13-16-year-old adolescents who have undergone heart surgery. The objective was to identify the overlap of the concepts DISEASE and CHD in the language consciousness of 56 teenagers operated on for CHD one year ago. The general sample consisted of 167 associations formed according to the psycholinguistic experiment with the word-stimulus ‘disease’ and 166 reactions obtained in the psycholinguistic experiment with the phrase-stimulus ‘congenital heart defect’. Two formed associative fields were based on the analysis of the general sampling. In terms of the number of lexico-semantic groups, the associative field of disease had a greater thematic diversity and revealed a concretizing orientation of word-associates. The associative field of CHD was less representative; however, in relation to the total number of associates/reactions, it had a lot of units belonging to the nuclear part of the field, and its near periphery demonstrated an obvious anthropocentric orientation.