Mechanisms of building the text contents and meaning in the process of its perception: psycholinguistic approach

The purpose of the article is to investigate the semantic structure of a text with the help of an experimental method. Text meaning and sense are supposed to be the components of the semantic structure. In the article the definitions of the terms “contents”, “meaning” and “sense” are given. The term “contents” is used differently from the terms “meaning” and “sense” when speaking about a text. Experimental research, described in the article, proves that there are mechanisms of text meaning formation and sense building which are not the same: preserving or change in the hierarchy of denotates in the contents structure of T2 in accordance with T1. We investigated a source text (T1) and produced texts (T2) and analyzed the mentioned above mechanisms. For the research we used such psycholinguistic methods as creating the denotational graph, pointing out themes, subthemes and analysis of denotational and connotational meanings of synonyms in the produced texts. These texts were produced in different ways: in an “active” and “passive” ones. As a result we proved the existence of mechanisms of text meaning formation and sense building as different phenomena and ascertained the necessity of the future research of the individual strategies of text perception by teenagers. The necessity of the further investigation of the individual strategies used in the process of understanding a text is explained.