Aspects of Interdisciplinary Research of Language and Speech

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Year by year the interdisciplinary approach to language and speech studies becomes more and more in demand. Scientific research in the crossroads of various sciences leads to the formation of multi-aspect view of the topics, connected with speech, cognition communication and provides not only for their deeper theoretical consideration, but brings real practical results. Studies in the field of psycho- and neuroclinical linguistics are useful not only for understanding brain mechanisms of speech and researching language system, but also for elaborating and constructing individual abilitation and rehabilitation trajectories for patients in case there exist speech disorders with children and adolescents so that to form personalized educative trajectories as well.

The series of the research articles given to the attention of the readers is devoted to a number of interdisciplinary topics referring to linguistics, in particular, with the psycholinguistics aspects of communicative behavior and the specifics of children’s speech development both normal and pathological ones.

The study by D.Sc. V.A. Pishchalnikova, and D.Sc.  in Philology K.S. Kardanova-Biryukova (both Moscow, Russian Federation) touches upon a number of issues connected with biology and psychology of language. The authors discuss the recursiveness as a dominant of the communitive behavior of a communicant in course of everyday habitual communication. The article describes a model of the recursive communicative human behavior basing on the auto-poetical theory [1], while they also discuss the results of a psycholinguistic experiment aimed at measuring the degree of stereotypes of the communicative behavior of statistically average representatives of a social environment which is significant for both the communicative studies and psycholinguistics on the whole, and in the long view could be useful for clinical practices because the database of typical schemes of everyday habitual communicative interaction seems to present proper and useful rehabilitation materials as well as a relevant one for people with speech disorders and cognitive degradation.

A group of researchers — M.I. Kiose, D.Sc. in Philology, A.V. Leonteva PhD in Philology, O.V. Agafonova, and A.A. Petrov (Moscow, Russian Federation) studies multimodal communicative moves in expositive dialogue; as a result of recording the gesture behavior of the participants of multimodal experiment using technologies of grasping moves and gaze behavior, it was proved that there are significant differences in using gaze directed onto the face of an interlocutor as well as gestures ti establish a contact under the influence of a demand and response in clusters with a nucleus of ‘developing a common or new theme. еWithin the mainstream of ontological linguistic studies the issue to reveal and systematically describe the basic mechanisms to acquire language by children both of typical and non-typical speech mastering, is of crucial importance. The article of  D.Sc.  in Philology G.R. Dobrova (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation) deals with one of such basic mechanisms — the differentiation. There are involved gender differences while the differences in acquiring generalization, those of differentiation and imitation among referential and expressive children is accentuated. The experiment carried out by the author according to a specially elaborated methods [2] in a group of children with typical speech development tends to be rather fruitful and promising in comparison with the sample of children having impediment of speech development.

Investigation of psycholinguistic mechanisms of speech generation has been carried out in Russia quite for a long time and is really productive (see in detail the works by T.V. Akhutina [3; 4]. It’s noteworthy that during the last 20 years the number of researches was rapidly growing in the field of studying impressive and expressive speech disorders. Especially concerning children as the representatives of various professions fix both quantitative growth of development disorders (including cognitive and speech ones), and qualitative changes of such disorders. Children’s speech of normal and specific development is being actively studied at all levels [5], but still, as was marked many times in special literature, the formation of syntax of the small aged children is one of the problems from the point of view of solving scientific-research tasks [6], especially when attributed to children with speech pathology. Research devoted to the forming of speech phrases are of a dramatic relevance as at present the dominant assumption reasons that to compare with the 20^th century, the average age to appear speech phrases by children has moved to rather later periods of time. A number of traits of the issue is tackled in the study carried out by PhD in Philology M.B. Eliseeva, and PhD in Philology E.A. Vershinina (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation), which reveal a time span to produce bi-syntaxeme utterances in small aged children’s speech considering the gender aspect as well. The statistical analysis performed by the authors is based on the MacArthur’s inquirers [7].

The most sophisticated and complex study (firstly, due to the necessity to analyze a great number of parameters) is represented in the investigation of speech development specifics by means of the texts constructed by children (both of typical development and of those having difficulties in speech and cognitive development) within oral and written discourses. Relatively, the study made by Ph.D. in Medical, D.Sc. in of Psychology research A.N. Kornev (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation), PhD in Philology Ingrida Balčiūnienė (Kaunas, Lithuania), and A.А. Vishonkina (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation) dealing with the specifics to acquire the genre repertoire in oral discourse by the children aged 4 to 6 with the initial underdevelopment of speech and their herd mates with normal development is of dramatic relevance. Justifying a limited research of the regular patterns of mastering oral discourse, the authors carry out a comparative study of the results obtained in course of the study concerning the dynamics of acquiring its genres as a narrative, description, expositive discourse and instruction. As a result of a distributive comparative analysis of the communitive behavior genre repertoire it was proved that the children with the underdeveloped expressive speech perceive socially pragmatic regulators of the society similarly to the children with typical development, but the greatest difficulty for then makes a personified discourse. The authors conclusions are of significance both from the point of view of social abilitation and elaborating their materials for speech development.

The study by D.Sc. in Philology I.V. Privalova, and D.Sc. in Philology A.A. Petrova (Kazan, Russian Federation) is also connected with the issues of text formation research of sampling the informants (children of 11–12 years old, the Russian language bearers) with typical development. The authors studied retelling the texts from the school manuals in comparison with the data on the level of children’s anxiety, the ability to focus on the learning task and focusing spontaneous attention as well as the data on the level of linguistic competence. The aspect of the study seems rather in demand but it doesn’t concern the issue of speech disorders, still it contributes to the studies of the level of stress, anxiety and depression of the children and adolescents — and broader — to the interdisciplinary research of the comorbidity of the higher level of anxiety and various somatic diseases along with linguistic analysis [8; 9].

T.V. Akhutina remarks that “in the cognitive linguistics the trend to bring together various sciences: psychology, linguistics, neurosciences, artificial intelligence, and philosophy –was also used to integrate psycholinguistics and related sciences” [1. S. 427]. In parallel, there emerged new methods including neurovizualization, functional diagnostics, which are widely used in modern neurocognitive and neurolinguistics research. It’s worth emphasizing that in the field of children’s speech studies a specific role belongs to the oculography method, which allows obtain new scientific data relating to the specificity of visual processing of stimuli of various types which creates a peculiar interest in studying the regularities of brain development. In particular, oculography significantly contributes to the research of reading mechanisms and the studies of reading disorders [10–12], which is of extreme relevance as in respect to the growth of number of children having specific and non-specific reading disorders and depending on those difficulties in teaching. Within the framework of these topics the study by PhD in Philology R.I. Shajhutdinova (Kazan, Russian Federation) was maintained. It studied the analysis of the eye moves specificity while fulfilling the tasks to find letters in their lexical and sub-lexical environment. The author contributes to the research of the interconnections between the reading skills, attention and processing of visual information by the children having dyslexia that could further serve as the correction basis for the problem.