Listening as a Subject of Study in Psycholinguistics

ABSTRACT The article reveals the phenomenon of «listening» from the standpoint of the main psycholinguistic paradigms – gestaltism, behaviorism, generative (generating) grammar, communicativism, connectivity, cognitive psycholinguistics, neuropsycholinguistics, activity psycholinguistics. Based on the analysis of these approaches, the author concluded that the most explanatory power of the multi-faceted phenomenon of «listening» has an activity psycholinguistics. From the position of activity-based psycholinguistics and with the support of the fundamental theoretical propositions of L.S. Vyhotskyi, A.A. Zalevskaya, A.R. Luria, A.A. Leontiev, M.I. Zhynkin, A.N. Sokolov and other scientists, the author’s definition of the term «listening» is presented. In particular: listening is a receptive, internally active kind of speech activity, the process of which consists in organic unity, simultaneous mnemic perceptual-mental interaction and active integrated realization: 1) auditory perception of the values of system of language codes reflecting real reality; 2) recognition, decoding and saving them in short-term memory; and 3) understanding the meaning of the speech message, which is accomplished by implementing the mechanisms of internal speech, in which the values of «surface» linguistic forms are decoded and transformed into «deep» meanings through the comprehension and rethinking of a particular fragment of reality reflected in the utterance. The result of perceptive-cognitive-affective processing is either the exact and complete decoding and reproduction by the recipient of the author’s meaning, the construction and the formation of an individual sense, authentic to the author’s, or inaccurate and incomplete reproduction of the author's sense and the development of the oncoming-own-understanding based on a multi-faceted sensory and rational individual auditive-linguistic experience of the subject of this activity, which was formed under the influence of societ