Author(s)

Irina Markovina, Istvan Lenart, and Orsolya Endrody

Corresponding Author

Istvan Lenart

ABSTRACT

Results of a blended research are presented in this paper, which aim at cross-culturally comparing 4-5-year-old Russian and Hungarian preschoolers’ verbal image of the world or linguistic consciousness. The interdisciplinary approach mingled the pedagogical approach with a psycholinguistic perspective, applying both the psycholinguistic theories of speech activity and linguistic consciousness, and the concept of childhood as a social construction. The prevailing methodology relied on the association experiment, complemented by the shoulder-to-shoulder method. Triangulation was ensured by the application of corpus linguistic methods for the analysis of the collected linguistic information. As a result of the study numerous universalistic (e.g. concept of family, perception of a child) as well as culture- and language-bound features (e.g. religious references) of Russian and Hungarian preschoolers’ linguistic consciousness were identified. Numerous effects of globalization were revealed including brand names, info-communication tools, and cartoons.

KEYWORDS

Early Childhood Education, Linguistic Consciousness, Cross-Cultural Studies