// Intercultural Communication Studies XXIII: 1 (2014) C.1-13.
The present article describes the contribution of Russian psycholinguistics to the theory of intercultural communication. Language is understood as an activity structure that occupies a central place in the human psyche as it provides access to culture (i.e. to an image of the world as the main component of culture). The main obstacle in any kind of communication, especially cross-cultural communication, is the fact that a thought cannot be directly transferred from one head to another. To communicate we use special signs, mainly linguistic ones, and therefore we rely on the knowledge that we acquired in our native culture. This is a key point for the Moscow school of psycholinguistics and for the field of research named ethnopsycholinguistics. The specific systemic character of the ‘world image’ (obraz mira) can be revealed through a large-scale associative experiment and associative dictionaries compiled based on results of the latter. The material of a direct associative dictionary makes it possible to observe the systemic character of the knowledge that is designated by the bodies of signs (i.e. words) of a given language, while a reverse dictionary allows for the observation of the systemic character of the world image of naïve (ordinary) culture members through analyzing the core of the verbal associative network.
