Current trends in psycholinguistics: distillation of the first decades of the 21st century

Over the past 15 years the research field of Russian psycholinguistics has experienced major changes and has become more diversified with the advance of such subfields as psycholinguoaxiology, associative lexicography, psycholinguoculturology, etc., which has understandably resulted in the diversification of the subject area as well as a vague psycholinguistic object. The analysis of the Proceedings of the academic forums held in 2013, 2022 and 2024, carried out by the authors, has outlined those research trajectories which tend to become less popular today and alternatively identify most intensely developing ones. The relevance of the current research is supported by the fact that these trends tend to determine further development of Russian psycholinguistics and make it possible to amend those changes which happen to the field naturally. At the same time relying on these findings we could define the boundaries of the psycholinguistic object and specify the methods and research tools with the greatest prognostic and research potential. The research material includes the Proceedings of several major academic events in the field including XX Symposium on Psycholinguistics of 2022, the conference “Language. Consciousness. Communication: Methodology and Practices in the Humanities” of 2024 and the monograph “Russian Psycholinguistics: Achievements and Advances (1966-2021)” of 2021. The reference point of the research is made by the X International Congress ISAPL “Problems of Informational Society and Applied Psycholinguistics” of 2013. The research is based upon cluster analysis, comparative analysis and content analysis. The findings of the research carried out by the authors include the observations to follow: the field of psycholinguistics has become very narrow with a vivid bias towards structural and content analysis of language consciousness, limited use of statistical tools and modeling in psychologuistic research. At the same time the analysis has helped identify the vectors to pursue in the next few decades including design of new methods and tools shaped specifically to be used with the object of psycholinguistics and identifying those research problems which could explicate new facets of this object.