The Estimated Aspect of Speech Associative Representation of Mental States

Abstract

The article deals with associative speech representation of mental states, its evaluation aspect. 32 students of the Kazan Federal University (26 females and 6 males) aged from 18 to 22 years took part in an association experiment, developed on the basis of the DMDX program. The time of speech reaction to the presented stimulithe concepts of 25 mental states was determined. The subjects had to estimate the states by answering the question "what?" and giving an adjective. The average time of the estimated response to the concepts of states on the computer monitor was 2246,9 milliseconds. Associative speech estimated reaction turned out to be the fastest to the stimuli "expectation" (1182,9 milliseconds), "thought" (1603,8 milliseconds), "fatigue" (1654,8 milliseconds), the slowestto the stimuli "remorse" (2808,5 milliseconds) and "nervousness" (2743,3 milliseconds). 463 associative speech reactions in the form of adjectives were given by the subjects to the concepts of 25 states, on average by 18,5 adjectives for each state. The concepts amorousness and remorse have the largest number of speech estimated associations (by 23 different adjectives). The least number of evaluative associations are characterized by the concepts thoughts, delight and indecision (by 15 adjectives). The most pronounced nucleus is the evaluative associative fields of states thoughts and delight. The evaluative associative fields of mental states are distinguished by the presence of nearnuclear layers and sufficiently densely filled periphery.