The study of the mental lexicon as a dynamic structure that determines speech production is one of the urgent problems of psycholinguistics. The research material included the Russian Associative Dictionary and the results of the 2020 Word Association Test, reflected in the Multilingual Associative Thesaurus of Politeness Project. To identify the dynamics of the mental lexicon, a comparative analysis of associative fields of different fixation periods was applied. In accordance with the theory of speech activity, "cue – target" combination is a speech action. Its relevant components are ways and means of predication. The ways of predication include sense, semantic and surface syntaxing as operations of speech production. The means of predication are conceptual responses, imagery responses, emotional and evaluative associates and operational responses, which demonstrate the specificity of distributive activation of sense. The paper shows that significant changes have taken place in the mental lexicon. The dominance of language as a reference point in the formation of associative links is typical of speech actions recorded in the Russian Associative Dictionary, since operational responses make up most of the structure of the associative field. According to the 2020 experiment, conceptual responses prevail. This indicates the dominance of cognitive reference points. The nature of imagery responses has changed. Most of them emphasize visual modality now. The analysis of the ways of predication made it possible to clarify the revealed trend of changes in the dominant reference points, which form associative links. It was experimentally established that the proportion of speech actions of the full syntactic cycle decreased by 24% in comparison with the data of the Russian Associative Dictionary, and speech actions of "topic – comment" format that do not involve semantic and surface syntactic operations increased by 27%. These results indicate a desire to simplify and minimize energy in the process of speech production, and also confirm the changes that have occurred in the simulated fragment of the mental lexicon.
The study of the mental lexicon as a dynamic structure that determines speech production is one of the urgent problems of psycholinguistics. The research material included the Russian Associative Dictionary and the results of the 2020 Word Association Test, reflected in the Multilingual Associative Thesaurus of Politeness Project. To identify the dynamics of the mental lexicon, a comparative analysis of associative fields of different fixation periods was applied. In accordance with the theory of speech activity, "cue – target" combination is a speech action. Its relevant components are ways and means of predication. The ways of predication include sense, semantic and surface syntaxing as operations of speech production. The means of predication are conceptual responses, imagery responses, emotional and evaluative associates and operational responses, which demonstrate the specificity of distributive activation of sense. The paper shows that significant changes have taken place in the mental lexicon. The dominance of language as a reference point in the formation of associative links is typical of speech actions recorded in the Russian Associative Dictionary, since operational responses make up most of the structure of the associative field. According to the 2020 experiment, conceptual responses prevail. This indicates the dominance of cognitive reference points. The nature of imagery responses has changed. Most of them emphasize visual modality now. The analysis of the ways of predication made it possible to clarify the revealed trend of changes in the dominant reference points, which form associative links. It was experimentally established that the proportion of speech actions of the full syntactic cycle decreased by 24% in comparison with the data of the Russian Associative Dictionary, and speech actions of "topic – comment" format that do not involve semantic and surface syntactic operations increased by 27%. These results indicate a desire to simplify and minimize energy in the process of speech production, and also confirm the changes that have occurred in the simulated fragment of the mental lexicon.