ASSOTIATIVE EXPERIMENT BASED ON “TERRORISM” LEXICAL UNIT

Abstract

The fact that nowadays the political situation in the world is unstable and the world community is increasingly facing the problem of extremism and its extreme form - terrorism - is beyond doubt. The tragic events taking place are regularly covered in the mass media. Such publications actively influence the formation of concepts in the minds of readers. The relevance of this study is due to the high social significance of the terrorist discourse, and the lack of special studies of this phenomenon based on the data of psycholinguistic experiments of Russian-speaking residents in Armenia and Russia.

The main advantage of the associative experiment is its simplicity, ease of use, since it can be carried out with a large group of respondents at the same time. Respondents work with the meaning of the word in “real” life, which allows us to highlight some unconscious, unforeseen components of the meaning.At the first stage of the obtained results’ analysis, all the received reactions were counted and the most frequent of them were established. Then we conducted a semantic-cognitive (semantic) analysis and grouped all reactions-associations according to a common semantic criterion. Thus, we have determined the semantic components of the associative field of the concept-stimulus “terrorism”. At the third stage, we carried out a quantitative analysis of the identified semantic-cognitive components in the structure of the analyzed concept field. The analysis of these data allowed us to establish the most frequent semantic components from which the core of the associative field was formed, less frequent reactions (semantic components) made up its periphery.As a result of the analysis, it was found that the presence of the most frequent reactions in the associative field of the word-stimulus terrorism, such as death - 30 reactions (9.3%), violence - 22 reactions (6.9%), explosion (+ explosions) - 17 reactions (5.3%), bomb (+ бомбы, bombs) - 15 reactions (4.7%), evil - 12 reactions (3.7%), fear - 12 reactions (3.7%), in our opinion, is due to the impact of the media on the formation of the concept of terrorism in the presentation of the participants of the experiment.

Keywords: terrorism, psycholinguistic experiment, free associative experiment, associative fields.