Psycholinguistic Aspects of Varying and Changing Proverb Structure. Mind, Mapping, and Memory

• Applicant: Dr. Claudia Lueckert
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2014 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 270149589

Proverbs are linguistically complex fixed expressions that are characterised by a low token frequency. Their familiarity in a given speech community is a result of their cultural salience. Analyses of language corpora and experimental data on proverb familiarity have shown that proverbs are marked both by a low token frequency and by a variability of their structure. The project examines an assumed facilitation process (p-lexicon mark-up) in the mental lexicon that may contribute to the storing, identification and production of these complex and rarely used fixed expressions. A corpus of familiar and frequent English proverbs will be compiled in this project so that content words may be extracted which are contextually predictable and whose frequency of occurrence is statistically significant. These content words might be involved in the assumed facilitation process. Subsequently the corpus data on this lexical profile of the proverbs will be used in a novel psycholinguistic experiment which tests the memorability of selected proverbs and of artificial proverbs (proverb dummies). This experiment draws on reaction time measuring and accuracy data and will be run to find empirical evidence for processing differences as reflected in an increased memorability that may go hand in hand with the assumed facilitation process. The project, therefore, makes a theoretical contribution to research which explores the structure of the mental lexicon with regard to the representation of proverbs. The analysis of the data which will be generated with the help of corpus linguistics and experimental psycholinguistics will make possible the testing of hypotheses on the storing and processing of proverbs. What is more, this investigation seeks to shed new light on the discrepancy between low token frequency and the familiarity of proverbs, a problem which is far from well understood at present.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Julie E. Boland; Professorin Dr. Pienie Zwitserlood