Counter-Text as a Tool of Psycholinguistic Diagnosing Comprehension of Foreign Language Utterance

Abstract

The research built on the anthropological approach to text comprehension links philosophical and psycholinguistic perspectives of speech perception. The article analyzes the factors influencing adequate comprehension when perceiving foreign language oral speech, in terms of testees’ approximately similar level of language competence and linguo-psychic characteristics. The object of research is counter-texts defined as those fixed in written form samples of а recipient’s internal speech emerging in the process of perceiving utterances. A counter-text reveals intertextual links between two pictures of the world – the author’s and recipient’s ones, wherein a new formation is a projection of a recipient’s consciousness on the initial text. Using the technique of counter-textual analysis, we were able to ascertain students’ individual strategies of understanding instrumental in adequate comprehending foreign language utterance. These strategies are retelling, translation and assertion, i.e. the ones that fix in recipient’s consciousness sense knots of the utterance for further cognitive processing. It has been established that understanding is marked by a small number of deviations from the author’s idea when, firstly, a recipient has a rather wide cultural scope, which provides points of coincidence of dominant knots of the communicant and recipient, and, secondly, he or she has verbal thinking. The received data also bears evidence to the fact of negative impact of creative thinking mechanisms that can distort the initial sense of the utterance.