Асоциативна сила на 236 произнесени английски думи за носителите на българския език

The problem of contrastive phonological analysis on the level of speech perception is discussed. Perception of foreign language sounds is studied by the methods of multidimensional psychological scaling of their acoustic similarity or by Osgood’s semantic differential technique. It is possible to make correspondences between foreign language sound and native language sound patterns by the phoneme analyses of the words given as associates to a spoken foreign language word. In this study 236 spoken English words were presented to 110 Bulgarian native language subjects with the request that within a five second response interval they indicate for each word whether or not it suggested a Bulgarian word-association to them. As our Bulgarian subjects have never studied English, the English words were nonsense syllables to them. Association value (meaningfulness) of these „nonsense syllables“ was measured by Glaze’s procedure. Bulgarian word-association vocabulary of the English words-stimuli is given at the end of the article. The vocabulary is a source for contrastive phonological studies of the Bulgarian and English languages, as well as for experimental studies of natural language mediators in second language learning.