THE PSYCHOLINGUISTIC MECHANISMS OF SOCIAL MEDIA LANGUAGE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ENGLISH AND UZBEK

Abstrak

This article investigates the psycholinguistic mechanisms governing the reception, processing, and interpretation of linguistic units within English and Uzbek social media discourse. Employing a comparative analytical framework, it specifically examines the cognitive load, semantic encoding, and pragmatic inference associated with digital language features such as emojis, abbreviations, neologisms, and community-specific slang. The study integrates data from prominent platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Telegram) with insights from linguistic corpora and experimental psycholinguistic research to delineate both language-specific and universal cognitive patterns. The analysis demonstrates that while the digital medium universally promotes economy, immediacy, and multimodality, the psycholinguistic adaptation to these demands is profoundly shaped by the structural typology (e.g., agglutinative Uzbek vs. analytic English), cultural context, and pragmatic conventions of each language community. Consequently, the study reveals distinct trajectories of linguistic innovation and user adaptation, highlighting how universal cognitive principles are filtered through and realized within specific linguistic and cultural systems.