| dc.description.abstract | This research work is devoted to the one of the most actively discussed problems of modern psycholinguistics - the problem of the understanding of the meaning of a word. Observations show that the meaning of a word, which the person knows, may not completely coincide with its system meaning given in a dictionary. We assume that the word's system meaning may vary in the individual consciousness of a particular language speaker, reflecting the level of system meaning assimilation. Different seme varieties of a word's system meaning, which are represented in the consciousness of the language-speakers of different age and gender groups, are the subject of this research. The material of the research is lexical units of foreign origin, which are frequently used in modern Russian and Finnish languages, but are difficult to understand for an average language-speaker. The importance of this research is conditioned by a very little amount of studies made on the problem of correlation between the system meaning of a word and its understanding, and the absence of methodology of such a kind of
research. The main methods used are: psycholinguistic experiment, qualitative and quantitative statistical analyses of experimental data, and questionnaires. These methods help not only to reveal the structure of word meaning in the language speaker's consciousness, but also to define language speaker's level of understanding of the meaning of a word. The purpose of this work is to reveal the levels of understanding of that or another word by a language-speaker, and to define the real seme structure of loan words in the language-speaker's consciousness. The study demonstrates the meaning structure of loan words in the language-speaker's consciousness, the levels of a loan word's understanding by the language-speaker, and the dynamics of semantic process in loan words. | en |
