STRATEGIES FOR INTERPRETING MOTIVATED KAZAKH VOCABULARY BY MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL CHILDREN OF NORTHERN KAZAKHSTAN

Abstract

The article summarizes the experience of conducting a psycholinguistic experimental study of children’s speech within the framework of the lexical theory of motivation. The focus is on strategies of interpreting motivated vocabulary of the Kazakh language by children aged 5 to 10 - monolinguals and Kazakh–Russian bilinguals living in the northern region of Kazakhstan. The relevance of the study is determined by the need to investigate children’s motivational reflection, understood as the ability to establish a connection between the sound form of a word and its meaning. This ability is considered a significant factor in the development of linguocognitive thinking, cognitive activity, communicative competence, and success in learning activities.

The aim of the study is to identify and describe strategies for interpreting lexical units of the Kazakh language based on psycholinguistic experimental data, as well as to conduct a comparative analysis of the use of these strategies with regard to children’s age characteristics and the nature of their language experience - monolingual or bilingual (Kazakh / Kazakh and Russian). The empirical basis of the study consisted of 893 children’s meta-utterances, which are verbal reactions reflecting awareness of word motivation. A set of methods was used in the study: psycholinguistic, descriptive, statistical, and comparative-motivological.

As a result of the analysis, 12 strategies were identified and described, reflecting features of perception, interpretation, and semantic reconstruction of motivated words in children’s speech. Both general patterns and specific features of strategy implementation among monolinguals and bilinguals were established. Commonality is manifested in the age-related dynamics of the development of motivational reflection in children aged 5–6, 7–8, and 9–10, which is confirmed by an increase in the frequency of language-oriented strategies. The identified differences show that monolinguals more often demonstrate productive and less variable responses oriented toward a single correct interpretation, whereas bilinguals resort to more diverse strategies, often interpret the internal form of a word fragmentarily, compare elements of two languages, and form occasional meanings. The results obtained expand understanding of the development of children’s speech and can be used in scientific research and in the practice of teaching the Kazakh language in mono- and bilingual environments.