Trend Study of Semantic and Grammatical Associative Networks of Verbs of Cognition in Russian Teenagers

The article proposes a new methodology for trend analysis of semantic and grammatic connections. The case study featured Russian verbs of mental activity dumat (to think) and vspominat (to remember) in the associative-verbal network of teenage native Russian speakers from the city of Omsk. The research was part of a larger project aimed at modelling the subjective semantics of lexemes of different grammatical classes in the consciousness of native Russian speakers of different ages. As psycholinguistics sees word semantics as something unique for each native speaker, the goal was to test subjective semantics and grammar for stability and variability in the associative-verbal network of teenagers (12–14 y.o., Omsk residents). The results of the free associative experiment were compared with those obtained from respondents of the same age in 2003. While some connections in the associative-verbal network proved to have changed over time, a stable core area persisted, e.g., the semantic connections with reactive infinitives or objects expressed by a noun in an indirect case. The latter grew more frequent in the experiment of 2023, which also revealed more overlaps between reactions to the two verbs, indicating an increase in the similarity of subjective semantic areas in the linguistic consciousness of Omsk teenagers.

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