Russian psycholinguistics: Yesterday, today, tomorrow (subjective notes on the study of mechanisms of language production and comprehension)

The paper contains an overview of the history of Russian psycholinguistics, namely the core part of it, which studies the mechanisms of language production and language comprehension, as well as research on the structure of the “mental lexicon”. The review is presented in the context of the history of worldwide psycholinguistics by W. Levelt. The paper describes in detail the emergence of Russian psycholinguistics in the early twentieth century, its formation in the second half of the twentieth century, the current state and the prospects for its further development in the first half of the twenty-first century. The main attention is paid to the description of two leading Russian psycholinguistic schools — the St. Petersburg school, which comes from the works of L. V. Shcherba, and the Moscow school, which is inextricably linked with the name of A. A. Leontiev. The key term of the study is the term “experiment”. The paper shows how diff erently it is interpreted in the psycholinguistic research of different schools and directions. The paper provides a detailed description of two experimental studies. The first study, performed by American scholars using the eyetracking methodology, is devoted to the phenomenon of syntactic ambiguity, which plays an important role in testing models of syntactic analysis in the process of language comprehension. The second study, performed by Moscow scholars using the method of associative experiment, describes the linguistic consciousness of Russian speakers. The fi nal part summarizes the results, concludes about the prevailing scientifi c paradigm in modern Russian psycholinguistics, and also discusses the prospects for Russian psycholinguistics in the light of T. Kuhn’s concepts of “scientific paradigms” and “scientific revolutions”.