High-frequency words in spontaneous monological descriptions: method of creating frequency list for lexical analysis

The article analyzes high-frequency words of spontaneous monological descriptions in Russian, recorded from 30 Chinese and 20 Russian informants. The material for the description was a plot image (comic) by H. Bidstrup "Elixir for Hair". The programs Mystem 3.1 and AntConc 4.3.1. have been used as tools for analysis. With their help, lemmatization and filtering of stop words were performed, on the basis of which a normalized frequency list of lemmas was created for further lexical analysis. Both groups of informants were balanced by gender, psychotype and level of proficiency in Russian (for the Chinese). The monologues were recorded in Russian as a native or as a second language. The results of the analysis showed that 60% of high-frequency words in the monologues of Chinese and Russian informants coincided (e.g., hair and elixir), but the Chinese significantly more often used the adverb of degree very, while the Russians preferred such concrete nouns as mirror and head. The differences are accounted for, in particular, by the transfer from the native language in the speech of the Chinese, limited proficiency in the second language, and strategies for simplifying vocabulary under stress when performing a task. The study confirmed the effectiveness of the corpus method in analyzing oral speech and provided empirical data for cross-linguistic comparison and teaching Russian to a foreign audience.