Psycholinguistic Features Of Imagination As A Component Of Ludic Competence

Ludic competence is an integral part of the professional competence of would-be psychologists; the psycholinguistic features of imagination are in turn an integral component of the ludic competence. We used the method of applied psycholinguistic research in order to define and explain the psycholinguistic features of imagination as a component of the ludic competence. The main stage of the research was a free association test with the stimulus word “imagination”, as the most elaborated technique of semantic analysis. The psycholinguistic features of imagination as a notion that belongs to the inner world and as a component of the ludic competence were reflected in everyday linguistic consciousness as three core (more than 10 %) semantic clusters: (a) associates that reflect psychological processes and states (54.5 %); (b) associates that are connected with creative activity (25.5 %); and (c) associates that describe the outside world (11 %). Imagination was mostly represented by lexemes with abstract semantics. The semantic content of the word “imagination” did not depend on gender identification. Both male and female respondents showed a positive emotional attitude to the stimulus “imagination” and evaluated it as something positive. Our data confirm that the psycholinguistic experiment and the method of free association, in particular, can be extensively applied beyond linguistics and prove to be rather effective.