Experimental psycholinguistics and media linguistics: a transdisciplinary approach to the study of specialized communication and Russian-Spanish terms

Abstract

Technological progress challenges participants in specialized communication, as well as terminologists and translators, forcing them to communicate and transfer knowledge at the global multilingual level. The terms codify specialized knowledge, and the application of the methodology of cognitive linguistics in terminology, which emphasizes structured knowledge, facilitates terminological management. The merging of experimental psycholinguistics and medialinguistics resources contributes to the study of the communication process between experts and to the terminological research. The traditional methodology for the study of texts in the framework of corpus linguistics is insufficient, given that the texts are a product of mainly conscious mental activity. The study of texts exclusively leaves behind the knowledge of unconscious automatic cognitive mechanisms and methods of semantic memory, which take a special part in specialized communication. This study of Russian, German and Spanish terminology of the environmental domain and oceanology demonstrates the need to combine mass resources and texts online and conduct psycholinguistic experiments with experts, using the terms as stimuli. An associative test compiled and analysed on the basis of online texts and conducted with non-specialists and experts in the field of oceanography, allowed to obtain lexical access to the mental vocabulary of experts. This methodology allowed us to shed light on the processes and forms of human conceptualization of scientific concepts, and also pointed out the necessity and expediency of organizing specialized knowledge into universal, dynamic, and language-independent frames. This transdisciplinary approach to the study of terms helps to increase the effectiveness of terminological management based on cognitive conceptual structures. He also contributes to the compilation of online terminology databases and translation studies, thereby improving specialized communication.