Dynamics of Junior and Senior Adolescents’ Cognitive Structures in Oral Spontaneous Recalls

Abstract

This work analyzes dynamics in manifestation of cognitive structures in junior and senior adolescents. The data were obtained experimentally through oral recalls of educational texts on social studies. The purpose of the study is to identify cognitive sphere development that is reflected in the propositional and semantic elements of oral recalls produced by adolescents of different ages. The cognitive structures were detected within the cognitive-anddiscursive paradigm with the help of psychological and psycholinguistic diagnostic approaches. Special functional syntax methods of predicate-and-actant elements of utterances analysis were used. It has been found out that the denotative maps of oral recalls performed by junior and senior adolescents demonstrate cognitive structures advancement, which is manifested in the evolution of thinking, consciousness, memory and language skills. As a teenager grows up, the actant-predicate relations in the logical scheme of recalls become more complex, in particular, there is an increase in number of complex semantic structures with connectors, taxis relations, the use of predicates with abstract and aspectual properties like resultative, procedural, dynamic, terminal, and statal. This article offers an insight into the work of adolescent’s cognitive system. The findings can be used in corpus and empirical studies.

Keywords

• cognitive structures
• junior adolescents
• senior adolescents
• oral recalls
• propositions