// 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.