This article focuses on the methodological framework of modern anthropocentric linguistics, an emerging interdisciplinary field of research. With new interdisciplinary research objects that cannot be analyzed within a single discipline or paradigm, it is important to adopt a research logic based on interdisciplinary cognitive attitudes and adapt the established scientific concepts accordingly. Here, we review the main interdisciplinary research objects, such as communication and language ability, and explain how they can be parameterized. Communication, as an adaptive behavior of a social human, can be explored through the interpretive categories of autopoiesis theory to build a model of a communicant for further experimental verification. Language ability can be effectively studied with the help of experimental research tools that analyze speech in emotionally stressful situations and identify patterns in the verbalization of emotions. These experimental data can be obtained by an association experiment, in which the associative field is understood as a constitutive element of the association-verbal network segment defining the rules of knowledge processing. The research tools and objects discussed in this article can be useful in medical practice, particularly in the diagnosis of speech disorders by detecting the stages of speech production and comprehension in which the deviations occur. Research problems that require further investigation include the development of models explaining the instability of word meaning, the formulation of universal psycholinguistic principles of sense production, and the discovery of a correlation between sense production and somatic processes.

This article reviews the published studies on visual precedence (pre-existing visual phenomena), which is a relatively new subject of linguistic research. It is shown that the active growth of the conceptual and terminological system related to visual precedence is accompanied by terminological ambiguities in defining pre-existing visual phenomena, by a lack of unanimity and contradictory reasoning about their forms in textual structures, as well as by an expanding range of phenomena attributed to visual precedence. At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, the specifics of pragmatic predetermination and use of the analyzed forms of pre-existing visual phenomena in political and media discourses have been highlighted. Furthermore, representative data have been collected on their origins and transfer into advertising discourse, and the first steps have been taken to better understand how these phenomena are used in other types of discourse, such as literary, artistic, popular science, educational, and portrait imagery. Researchers have distinguished between the general and particular (characteristic of specific communication domains) functions of pre-existing visual phenomena, and some progress has also been made in studying certain technologies actualizing their pragmatic functions. Based on their functional-pragmatic well-formedness, pre-existing visual phenomena can be considered as visual stylistic means, indicating the emergence of visual stylistics of the text.

This article considers the destructive changes in speech action, which are diagnosed by a comparative analysis of associative fields over time, and addresses two central problems: refinement of the long-standing concept of “speech action” and optimization of the established procedure for analyzing numerous and diverse associative data. The dynamics of the ways of predicating speech actions based on the material of associative fields was investigated. The principles of interpreting the cue, the target combination as a speech action, were further elaborated. The analysis relies on the results of free associative experiments and speech action modeling. The findings reveal a drastic change in the universal process of speech production over the past 27–30 years, with a significant decrease in the number of speech actions within the full syntactic cycle and a growing use of topic–comment structures and syntactic primitives as the types of speech action. The study is of great importance for psycholinguistics and associative lexicography, as it introduces a method for analyzing the associates indicative of the dynamics of language ability. In addition, the theoretical problem of classification of thematic or agrammatic responses as speech actions with a skipped operation of surface syntaxing was solved.

This article explores the possibilities of interaction between psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and text mining. When it comes to big data processing, the recent advances in psycholinguistics must be taken into account. In our digital reality, we should no longer view text as a mere sum of individual language units that are assembled based on their similarities in meaning. The insights of psycholinguistics into text have been revised, as in-depth text analysis unravels the new roles of the sender and the recipient, bringing to the fore qualitative methods for processing large data arrays. Without studying the mechanisms of speech generation and perception, it is impossible to improve language neural networks and machine translation engines. Here, the potential of psycholinguistics for training specialists in text analytics is discussed. As an example, the advantages of integrating the disciplines “Psycholinguistics” and “Psycholinguistic Methods for Studying Language and Text” into the psychological and linguistic module of the Master’s program “Text Analytics in Education and Science”, which has been launched at Kazan Federal University (Russia), are shown. The psycholinguistic component of the discipline “Corpus Linguistics” for Master’s students is described.

This article considers the formation and arrangement of the logotherapeutic terminological system. The latter developed after Viktor Frankl had introduced his logotherapy, a psychotherapeutic approach that revolves around the search for meaning; however, since that time, the advance of psychology and logotherapy has been accompanied by the emergence of many new terms and the growing need for clarification of some of the already established concepts. Now, it is getting increasingly important to create a more complete system of logotherapeutic terms that would be in line with the modern logotherapeutic idea of a human, as well as with the phenomena defining our personality from multiple angles and the world in general. Here, based on two logotherapeutic glossaries (one in Russian from A.I. Averyanov’s “Logotherapy and Existential Analysis: A Theory of Personality”, the other in English from M.H. Lewis’ “Logotherapy and Existential Analysis: A Glossary of English Terms”), the above need was justified. It was concluded that such a system should be structured as a glossary with regard to certain aspects (the presence of closed lexical groups, high-frequency words, and consistency of descriptions in all entries). Some problems and difficulties that arise at the macrostructural (including or ignoring items in the glossary without a clear reason, violating the alphabetical order, and spelling errors) and microstructural (in relation to defining the components of an entry) levels of the future glossary of logotherapeutic terms were identified and analyzed.

This article provides an overview of the early stages in the development of children’s speech system. Its main features (specific ways of gender identification, simplified inflectional rules, and free derivation) constitute the backbone of Russian grammar, which in turn defines the functioning of the entire mechanism of the Russian language. These are the underlying linguistic patterns and the most general rules. Children learn them at the earliest stage of language acquisition and then modify them using more intricate and complex patterns as they continue to develop their language system. Based on the results obtained, the structure of the Russian grammar framework, an artificial model that summarizes the tendencies inherent in children’s speech at different stages of language acquisition and brings them to a logical conclusion, is outlined. When young children follow the rules of this framework, they sometimes create unique speech products that deviate substantially from the norm. However, they rely on the fixed, albeit simplified, rules and thus master the tricky issues of the grammatical system of the Russian language. Therefore, the framework of Russian grammar, or the core of the Russian language system, should be taken into account in diagnosing the level of speech development, learning Russian as a foreign language, and working with bilingual children.

This article examines the role of generalization in the process of mastering temporal deixis in preschool children. Up to a certain age, children have difficulty in the acquisition of deixis, which is due to their individual and age-related characteristics, subjective perception of time, and inability to adjust to an actual starting point when it fails to match their “I-here-now” understanding. Here, the results of an analysis of children’s statements (from our notes and the diary entries by various authors) and the experimental data from 54 children aged 4 to 7 years are discussed and summarized. A number of examples are provided that prove the key importance of generalization skills in the acquisition of temporal deixis by preschool children. Detailed investigation of children’s statements reveals that most preschool children make incorrect generalizations in the early stages of speech ontogenesis: they often use “labels” (certain general “temporal” words that do not depend on the reference point) to mark time intervals, confuse and interchange antonyms like “tomorrow” and “yesterday”, use the same temporal word to refer to all past or future events, or mix up various associative series that belong to the category of time. However, through the incorrect choice and use of deictic means, young children gradually begin to recognize the meaning and correct use of deictic units. Thus, generalization facilitates children’s ability to comprehend language and its phenomena, such as the use of temporal deixis. The obtained results may be helpful for further psycholinguistic and ontolinguistic research, for teaching special courses on psycholinguistics, and for the work of specialists in the field of preschool education and speech ontogenesis.

This article considers the phenomena preceding the development of grammar acquisition in young children. The study is based on the analysis of questionnaires completed by parents (MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories). Estimates from 1037 questionnaires on children aged 18–36 months (550 girls, 487 boys) were entered into the database. Additional data were also obtained from a case study. The results of our analysis support the view on the priority of the cognitive component over the linguistic one in young children. At first, they develop the intention to convey certain ideas (about the missing owner of an object, as well as about the future and past) and then learn to express these ideas with specific linguistic means. The hierarchy of mastering utterances by children is determined by cognitive rather than linguistic factors. Most children find it easiest to name the adult who is not there at the moment when they see that adult’s things, and the ability to produce utterances about the objects they do not see or about the near future develops later. The utterances about the past are the most difficult because they are less important to children at an early age. Therefore, the non-morphological ways of expressing the meanings are gradually replaced by the morphological ones as children grow older.

This article outlines the results of a study of the features of linguistic reflection peculiar to children with different strategies of language acquisition, which is important because this problem has remained out of the attention of researchers. All data for the subsequent analysis were obtained by the methods of ontolinguistic experiment and mathematical statistics, and the criterion of verbal explicitness was used for distinguishing the features of the reflection on language among children and for defining the key terms. It was revealed that boys and girls do not differ significantly in their reflection on language, so any clear gender-related trends are not supported by our study and can be only assumed. Furthermore, it was established that referential children and children from families with high sociocultural status are more capable of reflecting on language. On the contrary, children from families with low sociocultural status and expressive children have the lowest number of reflections on language or poor prerequisites for this ability, which they acquire later as compared with referential children and children from families with high sociocultural status; such children primarily need help to develop their reflection on language and prerequisites for it. These findings can be useful to children’s speech development specialists and for psycholinguistic and ontolinguistic research, and the experimental series can be of great help as a tool for developing the reflection on language.

Effective identification, support, and development of children’s abilities is a priority task of the education system in Russia. This demands deeper research based on the use of modern diagnostic technologies and neuropsychological tools, especially in what concerns children with impaired development, such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Neuropsychological rehabilitation of children with ASD remains a poorly understood yet critical problem. Here, we explore common neuropsychological tools employed in Russia for diagnostics and therapy of ASD in childhood. The prospects of these methods to study the speech characteristics of such children were substantiated. The study is based on a survey of 20 parents of 20 children aged 4–6 years who attend the “WE ARE TOGETHER” Special Kindergarten for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders at Kazan Federal University (Russia). The speech characteristics of the children, starting from an early age, were thoroughly investigated during the experiment with the help of neuropsychological tools. The latter included game tasks to test social, cognitive, motor, neurodynamic, and regulatory skills, as well as the analysis of the transcripts of the interviews with both children and their parents. The results obtained facilitate the introduction of the neuropsychological approach to diagnose speech disorders in preschool children with ASD, and it can be further improved by experts in the rehabilitation and education of children exhibiting ASD symptoms.

In modern clinical practice, there are many conditions and diseases that cannot be detected by diagnostic testing alone due to their poorly understood pathogenesis. This is particularly true for somatoform, stress-related, and anxiety-depressive disorders: they are primarily diagnosed based on the patient’s narrative and the input of their family members, which thus highlights the interdisciplinary nature of the above-stated problem and defines an area ripe for further research in clinical linguistics. This article provides a brief analysis of the psychometric tools commonly used in the diagnostic screening for anxiety and depressive disorders among patients of various profiles. The obtained results show that most screening methods lack any nosological specificity or validity for geriatric practice. A new variant of the geriatric anxiety scale (GAS) was developed with the clinical and linguistic profiles of elderly patients taken into account.