Verbalization of cognitive processes in the texts of bilinguals with alexithymia

Abstract

This article describes certain fragments of verbal-lexical and linguistic-cognitive levels of linguistic personality of the bilinguals with alexithymia. The goal lies in their determination, description, and comparison with the corresponding fragments of linguistic personality of the Russians with alexithymia for outlining the parameters that correlate or do not correlate with nationality and alexithymia status of the respondent. The research leans on the linguistic, quantitative and qualitative content analysis of autobiographical texts. The essential condition for including in the number of respondents was a pronounced alexithymia status (diagnosed in accordance with the Toronto Alexithymia Scale), affiliation to Altai or Yakut ethnic group, and command of the corresponding language (bilingualism). The following conclusions were made: certain cognitive and lexical-semantic parameters remain constant, while morphological and punctuation parameters among Altai and Yakut people cease to be the criterion of the pronounced alexithymia status of a person. The acquired results can be used as a complementary instrument for the diagnosis of alexithymia and its correction. The relevance of this research is substantiated by incidence of the phenomenon of alexithymia and the need for conducting comparative study of the texts of persons with alexithymia who belong to different ethnic groups, which allows determining the framework of such supplementary instrument of diagnosis as text analysis.