Bilingualism and Culture: Psycholinguistic Aspect

Abstract

The development of bilingualism of a bilingual child is inextricably linked with the formation of an individual folklore-linguistic picture of the world. In this regard, proverbs, sayings, riddles and folk phraseology as universal phenomena of folklore of the Russian and Greek languages, which have important linguistic and cultural potential, are of particular interest from the point of view of their presence in the bilingual speech and thought activity.

The quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the functioning of paremiological and phraseological units in a bilingual speech determine the content of folklore language worldview and directly depend on the type of formation of the child’s early bilingualism.

Phraseological and paremiological composition of the folklore picture of the world of natural Russian-Greek bilinguals is asymmetric and directly depends on the type of early bilingualism –  in bilinguals who learn two languages on the principle of “one-person-one-language ”, asymmetry prevails in favor of the Greek language, children from Russian-speaking families whose bilingualism develops according to the principle “family language is the language of society ” exhibit better knowledge of Russian folklore elements compared to Greek