PSYCHOLINGUISTIC PECULIARITIES OF PERCEPTION OF LEXIS IN HIEROGLYFIC AND ALPHABETIC LANGUAGES

Abstract

The article discusses peculiarities of perception of Chinese characters. Scientific novelty of the study lies in the difference between the experimental data obtained as a result of analysis of perception peculiarities of Chinese characters and words of an alphabetic language. The conclusions are drawn on the basis of an associative experiment conducted with students learning Chinese as a second foreign language after English. The results are compared with the previously carried out associative experiments aimed at studying the characteristics of mastering the vocabulary of French as a second foreign language. The comparison allows coming to some conclusions about the peculiarities of perception and functioning in the individual lexicon of words of the hieroglyphic language in comparison with the alphabetic one. In the case of alphabetic languages, the leading ones are the connections of foreign words with their equivalents from the native and first foreign languages, as well as formal connections based on the graphics or phonetics. Chinese characters, however, are interpreted as images based on the knowledge of their meaning or without it.