Youth slang: The perception of verbal borrowings by native speakers

This article presents the results of a psycholinguistic study aimed at determining the peculiarities of perception of English-language verb borrowings by Russian representatives of different age groups and professions. The research is based on the psycholinguistic theory of the word as a means of access to a single perceptual-cognitive-affective information base of a person and the concept of the specifics of the functioning of individual knowledge, developed by A.A. Zalevskaya. Quantitative indicators and qualitative analysis of the results obtained in the experiment made it possible to identify several groups of borrowed verbs depending on the level of their adaptation in the new language system. In addition, the experimental study was conducted in two stages (in the first part, stimuli were presented without context, in the second – in context), which allowed, during the analysis of the experimental results, to compare the characteristics of the identification of a borrowed English word by the subjects in a situational context and without it. The experimental material, English-language verb borrowings, is analyzed from the point of view of an individual using them: age, level of education, profession, level of knowledge /non- knowledge of a foreign language play an important role in the process of identifying words of youth slang. With age, the tolerant attitude towards borrowings decreases, while it turned out that representatives of the humanitarian professions are generally more tolerant of foreign language vocabulary than people who are professionally unrelated to language and cultural studies. With an increase in the level of education of the subjects, the speech adaptation of new borrowings is easier.