Ethno-linguistic contact as reflected in language cognition: Does bilingualism affect subjective assessments of perceptual semantics?*

Abstract

The article analyzes the influence of the ancestral language on the perception of the second language, acquired throughout life. The study relies on the methods of experimental cognitive psycholinguistics, drawing on the theory of embodied cognition and the bilingual mental lexicon. The solution of the general theoretical problem uses early natural bilingualism, with an increasing dominance of the second language and a gradual shift of the native language to the position of the language of family heritage. This type of bilingualism is currently very common in the world, including various regions of the Russian Federation. In modern states, it is conditioned by unbalanced language functional advancement of the state language. The functionally imbalanced language situation has also developed in the regions of Southern Siberia, in the interaction between the Russian and the Khakass or Tatar languages. However, the functionally dominant state language, Russian, experiences a hidden influence of maternal languages not only on speech practices, but also on deep cognitive processes associated with the perception and cognitive processing of units of the acquired language. As the analysis has shown, the influence of the native language is manifested at the level of perception of even the deepest aspects of the semantics of the second language, which include perceptual and emotional aspects. This effects are discussed in the article in the assessments of tactile perception and emotionality given by native Russian speakers and Tatar-Russian and Khakass-Russian bilinguals in relation to the same set of lexical units. The study was carried out on the material of the psycholinguistic RuTurkPsychLing database designed in the laboratory of linguistic anthropology of Tomsk State University: assessments of the words of the Russian, Tatar, and Khakass languages in terms of “familiarity”, “temperature”, “location in space”, “size”, “emotionality” and “manipulation”. The analysis has shown significant differences in the rating system, manifested both in the value of average ratings and their correlations. While the assessments of the Khakass-Russian bilinguals are closer to the assessments of native Russian speakers, the Tatar-Russian bilinguals show significant differences both in the assessments of temperature perception and its correlations with positive and negative assessments.