Directed associative experiment from various options free is different in that the subject, in response to stimulus words, answers (or writes down) not with any words that came to his mind, but in accordance with the experimenter's instructions. Thus, the associative reactions of the subjects seem to be directed along a certain channel. This imposes restrictions on the processes of mental search of the subjects when choosing the appropriate words from the ones at their disposal. Instructions can be different both in direction and in degree of complexity. For example, the selection of reactions-antonyms or synonyms is an easier task than selection based on the principle of generic or power relations. The number of stimuli, as in the previous version of the free associative experiment, is 30-40 words, but in accordance with the instructions, they are chosen more meaningfully, for example, using a dictionary of synonyms or antonyms.

Instructions for test subjects:"In response to the presented stimulus word, write down the word of the opposite meaning (antonym)."

List of stimulus words

1. Anger 16. Pinnacle

2. Mister 17. Dull

3. Sluggishness 18. Loving

4. Shame 19. Land

5. Opponent 20. Culture

6. Black 21. Woman

7. Jump 22. Child

8. Handsome 23. Nakhodka

9. Virgin 24. Hope

10. Humanity 25. Frost

11. Laughter 26. Work

12. Attack 27. Smooth

13. Storm 28. Take

14. Boredom 29. Praise

15. Trouble 30. Adagio

For rate experimental results a table should be prepared (Table 7.15.1) indicating adequate reactions, inadequate and approximately correct, the so-called semantic paraphasias (para - about, phases - meaning).

Table 7.15.1

Results of a directed associative experiment

With a good or satisfactory knowledge of the language and the active use of its internal structural connections, the subjects will show high results in the second column - adequate reactions, up to 100%. Indicators for the third column will also be good enough for diagnosis, but it is still desirable to more accurately follow the experimenter's instructions. For example, if the subject answers the word “shame” with the word “pride”, then such an answer will fall into the second column, since according to the dictionary of antonyms of the Russian language, it was necessary to write the words “honor”, ​​“glory” or “honor”. The third column includes those answers of the subjects that do not correspond to the instructions at all. For example, in response to the word “shame”, the subject writes the words “shame”, “condemnation” and others that do not correspond to the idea of ​​opposition. The directed associative test, therefore, checks not only knowledge of the language, but also the ability to think logically, correlate Various types connections, differentiate individual characteristics.

Correct answers-antonyms: 1 - kindness, 2 - servant, slave, 3 - agility, dexterity, agility, 4 - honor, glory, honor, 5 - partner, colleague, like-minded person, 6 - white, 7 - stand, 8 - ugly, ugly, ugly, 9 - arable land, arable land, cultivated land, 10 - misanthropy, 11 - crying, 12 - defense, protection, 13 - quiet, peace, 14 - fun, 15 - joy, 16 - base, sole, 17 - bright, 18 - hate, 19 - sea, water, 20 - ignorance, 21 - man, 22 - old man, 23 - loss, 24 - despair, 25 - heat, heat, 26 - rest, idleness, 27 - rough, 28 - to give, 29 - scolding, swearing, criticism, 30 - allegro, presto, scherzo.

CHAIN ​​ASSOCIATION TEST

Under the chain association is understood the uncontrolled, spontaneous flow of the process of reproducing the content of the consciousness and subconsciousness of the subject, the so-called "subconscious stream". This method is readily used by psychoanalysts. In an individual conversation with their patients, they offer them, in a relaxed state with a lack or reduced self-control, to say whatever they want, that is, they offer them to “talk out”. Later, this speech material is analyzed to identify unconscious anxieties, phobias, drives and transfer them to the level of awareness, verbalization. For greater convenience and reliability of the results, the subjects are asked to pronounce any individual words that come to their mind for a certain period of time. The result is a chain of associative reactions, composed of individual words. These words, regardless of the desire of the subjects, are combined into certain semantic groups, or semantic nests. The size and number of semantic nests in this case can be different, which determines individual characteristics. In one nest there can be from one word to several and even up to all the words of the chain: for example, in the chain “song, cheerful, voice, beautiful, metal, gold, silver, glitters, spring, flowers, aroma”, three semantic nests are distinguished by 3 -4 words each. These nests, in accordance with their content, are brought under a more general category - the name. AT this example these can be the names "beautiful song", "brilliant metal", " blooming spring". Judging by the names and the small size of the semantic nests, this subject does not experience any particular anxieties and any worries, so the psychoanalyst confines himself to ordinary conversation. If the size of the nest becomes large - 10-15 words, and the names reflect unpleasant emotional events, such as fear of robbery or a painful state, the psychoanalyst's task becomes to develop constructive measures to remove the patient from a painful state.

The question of the need for an experiment for linguistics was first raised in 1938 by L.V. Shcherba in the already mentioned article “On the Triple Aspect of Linguistic Phenomena and on the Experiment in Linguistics”. The scientist believed that “to derive a language system, that is, a dictionary and grammar”, is possible from “corresponding texts, that is, from the corresponding language material”. In his opinion, it is quite obvious that no other method exists and cannot exist in application to dead languages. At the same time, L.V. Shcherba noted that languages ​​become dead when they cease to serve as an instrument of communication and thinking within the human collective, they then cease to develop and adapt to the expression of new concepts and their shades, they stop what can be called the language-creative process.

Things should be somewhat different, he wrote, in relation to living languages. According to Shcherba, “most linguists usually approach living languages, however, in the same way as they approach dead ones, i.e. accumulates linguistic material, in other words, writes down texts, and then processes them according to the principles of dead languages. Shcherba believed "that this results in dead dictionaries and grammars." He believed that "a student of living languages ​​should act differently."

“The researcher,” Shcherba wrote, “must also proceed from the language material understood in one way or another. But, having built some abstract system from the facts of this material, it is necessary to check it on new facts, i.e. to see whether the facts derived from it correspond to reality. Thus, the principle is introduced into linguistics experiment. Having made some assumption about the meaning of this or that word, this or that form, about this or that rule of word formation or form formation, etc., one should try whether it is possible to connect a number of different forms using this rule.

Shcherba also wrote that an experiment can have both positive and negative results. Negative results indicate either the incorrectness of the postulated rule, or the need for some of its restrictions, or the fact that the rule is no longer there, but there are only dictionary facts, etc. Giving examples of the correct ones; (1-3) and incorrect (4) sentences, Shcherba argued that a language researcher should address the question of the correctness or incorrectness of linguistic material to a native speaker, not relying only on his intuition. At the same time, he believed that this kind of experiment is already being carried out in nature, when a child learns to speak, or when an adult learns a foreign language, or in pathology, when speech decay occurs.

There was no trade in the city.

There was no trade in the city.

I(3) There was no trade in the city.

I (4) * There was no trade in the city.

The researcher also mentioned the mistakes of writers, believing that "lapses" are associated with a poor sense of language. It is noteworthy that at the same time, Freud wrote about slips of the tongue and slips, interpreting this in the paradigm of psychoanalysis. At the same time, under the experiment in linguistics, Shcherba meant: 1) introspection, self-observation, and 2) setting up the actual experiment. He wrote about the principle of the experiment as an important point that allows you to penetrate deeper into the understanding of human speech activity. Since he wrote this in the 30s of the 20th century, when there was a struggle of opinions in Soviet linguistics, the scientist, fearing accusations of individualism, proved the methodological correctness of the method he proposed. So, in addition to what was said, Shcherba added: “With a very common fear that with such a method the “individual speech system”, and not the language system, must be done away with once and for all. After all, the individual speech system is only a concrete manifestation of the language system. Even if we follow a narrow understanding of the role of experiment in linguistics as a verification of the provisions of a normative language system with the facts of a living language, we should recognize, following the scientist, that linguistic knowledge makes it possible to understand human consciousness.

Domestic psycholinguist L.V. Sakharny noted that supporters of traditional methods of linguistic analysis have a number of objections regarding experiment. They usually boil down to the following:

The materials of the experiments are very interesting, but you never know what the subjects can say on the instructions of the experimenter? How to prove that the experiment reveals really linguistic rules?

In the experiment, deliberately artificial situations are created, which is not typical for the natural functioning of language and speech.

Spontaneous speech sometimes reveals something that no experiment can organize, i.e. the possibilities of experimental methods are quite limited.

Sakharny believed that these questions could be answered as follows:

The question is what is being studied in the experiment - language or speech? Traditional linguistics recognizes that it is impossible to enter the language otherwise than through speech. But if you study language through spontaneous texts, why not study it through texts obtained in experiments? (Recall that in linguistics, language is understood as a system, and speech as its implementation.)

Although the situations in the experiment are also artificial, the fundamental features of speech activity that are revealed in the experiment are characteristic of speech activity in other, non-experimental situations. It is impossible to draw a clear line between typical and atypical, natural and artificial situations.

Experiment is not the only possible method of psycholinguistic research. Psycholinguistics does not deny either the material or the method of observation that traditional linguistics has at its disposal. Psycholinguistics uses this material, but from a slightly different angle, in a broader context of both material and methods. Both verbal and non-verbal contexts are taken into account, and general terms and Conditions activities, and the intention of the communicant, and the state of the participants in communication.

As a feature of the language of Russian psycholinguistics, it can be noted that it uses the concept of "subject" and not "informant". Informant(from Latin informatio - clarification, presentation) - this is a subject included in the experiment and informing the experimenter about its progress, about the features of its interaction with the object. test subject- this is a subject who, being a native speaker, is also an expert in the field of its use, and at the same time indirectly informs the experimenter about fragments of his linguistic consciousness. In other words, psycholinguistics accepts the fact of subjective interpretation of linguistic material by a native speaker not as a factor of interference, but as a fact subject to scientific analysis.

An important feature of psycholinguistics is the appeal to the meaning of the word - to its semantics (from the Greek semantikos - denoting). In linguistics, the analysis of semantics is associated primarily with the study of the lexical meaning of words and expressions, changes in their meanings, the study of turns of speech or grammatical forms. Psycholinguistics distinguishes between objective and subjective semantics. The first is a semantic system of language meanings, the second is presented as an associative system that exists in the mind of an individual. In this regard, semantic features are divided into those related to the field of associations (subjective) and belonging to the semantic components of the vocabulary, taken in an abstract-logical (objective) plan. The psycholinguistic concept of "semantic field" is a collection of words together with their associations.

One of the attempts to experimentally determine subjective semantic fields and connections within them is the method of associative experiment.

Associative experiment is the most developed technique of psycholinguistic analysis of semantics.

2.1. Association experiment. The subjects are presented with a list of words and told that they need to answer the first words that come to mind. Usually each subject is given 100 words and 7-10 minutes for answers. Majority reactions, cited in associative dictionaries, received from students of universities and colleges aged 17-25 years, for whom the language incentives is native.

There are several types of associative experiment:

Free association experiment. Subjects are not given any restrictions on reactions.

Directed associative experiment. The subject is asked to give associations of a certain grammatical or semantic class (for example, choose an adjective for a noun).

Chain association experiment. Subjects are asked to respond to stimulus several associations - for example, give 10 reactions within 20 seconds.

There are special dictionaries of association norms, among the well-known ones is the dictionary of J. Deese (J. Deese. The Structure of associations in language and Thought. Baltimore, 1965). In Russian, the first dictionary of this kind was the Dictionary of Associative Norms of the Russian Language, ed. A.A. Leontiev (Moscow, 1977).

At present, the most complete dictionary in Russian (and in principle) is the “Russian Associative Dictionary” (compiled by: Yu.N. Karaulov, Yu.A. Sorokin, E.F. Tarasov, N.V. Ufimtseva, G. A. Cherkasova. - M., 1994-2002). It includes the following parts: v. 1. Direct dictionary: from stimulus to response; v. 2. Reverse dictionary: from response to stimulus; v. 3-6 are also direct and reverse dictionaries of the other two lists of words. This dictionary contains 1277 stimuli, which is slightly less than the number of words used by speakers in everyday speech (1500-3000); 12 600 recorded as answers different words, and in total - more than a million reactions.

The structure of the dictionary entry in the "Russian Associative Dictionary" is as follows: first, the headword is given, then the reactions are arranged in descending order of frequency (indicated by a number). Within the groups, the reactions follow in alphabetical order (5):

FOREST... field, trees 11, autumn, large, birch 7, etc. Numbers (6) are given at the end of each article:

FOREST... 549 +186 + 0 + 119.

The first digit indicates total reactions to stimuli, the second - the number of different reactions, the third - the number of subjects who left this stimulus unanswered, i.e. the number of failures. Fourth - the number of single answers, i.e. reactions that were given only once and whose frequency is, respectively, one.

2.2. Interpretation of the answers of the associative experiment. There are many possibilities for interpreting the results of an association experiment. Without going into scientific disputes, we will consider some of them.

When analyzing the answers of an associative experiment, syntagmatic (7) and paradigmatic (8) associations are distinguished, first of all:

the sky is blue, the car is driving, smoking is bad

table - chair, father- mother

Syntagmatic associations are associations whose grammatical class is different from the grammatical class of the word. stimulus. Paradigmatic associations are reaction words of the same grammatical class as stimulus words. They obey the principle of "minimal contrast", according to which the less stimulus words differ from reaction words in terms of the composition of semantic components, the more likely the reaction word is actualized in the associative process. This principle explains why the semantic composition of the stimulus word can be restored by the nature of the associations: the set of associations issued for the word contains a number of features similar to those contained in the stimulus word (9).

native speaker by reactions can be easily restored stimulus(in case (9) this is holiday).

(9) summer; summer 10; rest 6; short, soon, cheers 4; idleness, in Prostokvashino, began, school

It is believed that paradigmatic associations reflect linguistic relations, and syntagmatic associations reflect speech relations.

There are also genus-species relations (10), reactions that have phonetic similarity with the stimulus (11), clichéd (12) and personal (13):

animal - cat, table - furniture

house- tom, mouse- book

master - golden hands, guest- stone

man - I have to

2.3. Significance of the results of the associative experiment. The associative experiment is widely known and actively used in psycholinguistics, psychology, sociology, and psychiatry.

The results of the associative experiment can be used, first of all, in different areas of linguistics. In particular, due to the fact that it is usually carried out on a large number of subjects, it is possible to construct a table of the frequency distribution of reaction words for each stimulus word. In this case, it will be possible to calculate the semantic proximity (semantic distance) between different words. A measure of the semantic similarity of a pair of words is the degree of coincidence of the distribution of answers, i.e. the similarity of their associations. This value appears in the works of different authors under different names: "intersection coefficient", "association coefficient", "overlapping measure".

Determining the semantic distance between words can help solve one of the possible problems for linguistics - synonymy. So, if you need to determine the degree of similarity between words that have a similar meaning (14), then you can interview different people and everyone will imagine this similarity in different ways. Yes, for someone Job will look like case, but for someone work. Or you can also invite the subjects to give reactions to each of these words (it is better to present them separately - in a list with other words), and then see how many reactions match. In this case, it may turn out that some pairs of words are “closer” to each other than others. (In this case, the closest pair was work - work, followed by a couple case- Job, and then labor is business). Thus, a survey of a large number of subjects using an associative experiment will show a measure of semantic proximity between these words. (fourteen) work, work, business

Sometimes this kind of data coincides with the results of distributive-statistical analysis of texts, when researchers do not refer to the experiment, but carry out an independent count of word combinations (the so-called distribution). The associative experiment, on the other hand, makes it possible to find out how fragments of linguistic consciousness are arranged in native speakers.

At one time, J. Deese tried to reconstruct the semantic composition of a word based on an associative experiment. matrices semantic distances Secondary associations to the word-stimulus (ie, associations to associations) he subjected to the factor analysis procedure. The selected factors received a meaningful interpretation and acted as semantic components of the meaning. A.A. Leontiev, commenting on the results of Deese, believed that they clearly show the very possibility of identifying, on the basis of a formal processing of the data of an associative experiment, factors that can be interpreted meaningfully as semantic components of words. And thus, an associative experiment can serve as a way of obtaining both linguistic and psychological knowledge.

Precisely because during the associative experiment the subject is asked to respond to a particular word with the first word or phrase that comes to mind, very interesting results can be obtained (15):

(15) STUDENT(652 people) - institute 44, eternal 41, student 39, poor 34, correspondence student 28, cheerful 20, young, good 18, bad 16, scholarship 14, exam I, applicant, martyr, teacher 10, eternal feeling of hunger, wine, hunger, hungry, wonderful times, psychosis, five years of rest - twenty minutes of shame 1.

The associative experiment shows the presence in the meaning of the word (as well as the object denoted by the word) of a psychological component. Thus, the associative experiment makes it possible to build the semantic structure of the word. It serves as a valuable material for studying the psychological equivalents of what is called the semantic field in linguistics, and reveals the semantic connections of words objectively existing in the psyche of a native speaker.

In the same connection, it should be noted that the main advantage of the associative experiment is its simplicity, ease of use, since it can be carried out with a large group of subjects simultaneously. The subjects work with the meaning of the word in the "mode of use", which makes it possible to single out some unconscious components of the meaning. So, according to the results of the experiment, it turns out that in the word exam in the minds of native speakers of the Russian language (and, accordingly, culture) there is such a psychological moment of this word as difficult, fearful, terrible, difficult(sixteen). It is absent in linguistic dictionaries.

(16) EXAM(626 people) - difficult 87, pass 48, pass 35, session 26, pass 21, ticket 18, soon 17, math 13, matriculation, fear 10, terrible 8, heavy 6.

A feature of associative reactions to a word is that subjects may be sensitive to the phonological and syntactic level of the stimulus word.

Note that some phonetic associations can also be considered as semantic ones (17). They are usually given to subjects who are unwilling to cooperate with the experimenters, or in a state of fatigue (for example, at the end of a long experiment), as well as to mentally retarded subjects.

Some reactions (18) can be interpreted both as semantic and as phonetic. They are most often given to test subjects in a state of fatigue or mentally retarded test subjects.

(17) mother - frame, house - smoke, guest- bone

Most of the associations are due to speech stamps, clichés. At the same time, the associations also reflect various aspects of the subject's native culture (18) and textual reminiscences (19).

square- Red

master - Margarita

It is important to note that the plane of verbal associations is not completely isomorphic to the plane of object relations. So, for example, in the experiments of the 1930s, Karwosky and Dorcus showed that colors are associated differently than the words denoting them (along with the color names, the subjects were presented with cards of different colors). In other words, in the minds of the subjects, the colors themselves are connected in a slightly different way than the words that designate them.

The associative experiment is of particular importance for psychologists, since it is one of the the oldest tricks experimental psychology. George Miller very vividly describes the history of this technique. Sir Francis Galton, English scientist and cousin Charles Darwin, first tried an association experiment in 1879. He chose 75 words, wrote each of them on a separate card and did not touch them for several days. Then he took the cards one by one and looked at them. He kept time on a chronometer, starting from the moment when his eyes stopped on a word, and ending with the moment when the word he read caused him two different thoughts. He wrote down these thoughts for every word on the list, but declined to release the results. “They lay bare,” Galton wrote, “the essence of human thought with such amazing distinctness and certainty that it would hardly be possible to preserve if they were published and made public to the world.”

Currently, a similar technique is known as the Kent-Rozanov free association technique (G. H. Kent, A. J. Rozanoff). It uses a set of 100 words as stimuli. Speech reactions to these words are standardized on a large number of mentally healthy individuals, and specific gravity non-standard speech reactions (their correlation with standard ones). These data allow us to determine the degree of eccentricity, unusual thinking of specific subjects.

associative field each person has his own both in terms of the composition of the names, and in terms of the strength of the connections between them. The actualization of this or that connection in the answer is not accidental and may even depend on the situation (20). Undoubtedly, the influence of the level of education of a person on the structure of his mental lexicon. Thus, associative experiments on the material of the Russian and Estonian languages ​​revealed that people with a higher technical education more often give paradigmatic associations, and those with a humanitarian education give syntagmatic associations.

(20) friend - Bear

The nature of associations is affected by age, geographical conditions, and the profession of a person. According to A.A. Leontiev, different reactions to the same stimulus were given by a resident of Yaroslavl (21) or Dushanbe (22), a conductor (23), a nurse (24) and a builder (25).

brush- mountain ash

brush - grape

brush - smooth, brush- soft

hand - amputation

brush - hair

However, belonging to a certain people, one culture makes the "center" of the associative field as a whole quite stable, and the connections are regularly repeated in this language (26, 27, 28). According to the Tver psycholinguist A.A. Zalevskaya, associations also depend on the cultural and historical traditions of the people - Russian (29), Uzbek (30), French (31).

poet - Pushkin

number - three

friend- comrade, friend - enemy, friend- loyal

bread - salt

bread- tea

bread - wine.

The data obtained by comparing associations in a historical perspective are indicative. So, when we compared associations to the same stimuli, it turned out that the three most frequent reactions to the word stimulus in 1910 averaged about 46% of all responses, and in 1954 - already about 60% of all responses, those. the most frequent reactions became much more frequent. This means that as a result of standard education, the spread of television and other mass media, the stereotyping of reactions has increased, people have begun to think more alike.

Philological sciences

Keywords: THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE; LINGUISTIC PICTURE OF THE WORLD; LINGUISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS; ASSOCIATIVE EXPERIMENT; COGNITIVE CULTUROLOGY; THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE; LANGUAGE PICTURE OF THE WORLD; LANGUAGE CONSCIOUSNESS; ASSOCIATIVE EXPERIMENT; COGNITIVE CULTURAL STUDIES.

Annotation: This article substantiates the effectiveness of the use of psycholinguistic methods in the field of linguoculturological knowledge. The results of the study can be used for further development of a special culturological direction — cognitive culturology. The concept theory proposed in this paper can become methodological basis for the reconstruction of specific cultural concepts and concept spheres. These articles can be used in the courses of linguistics, regional studies, lexicology, stylistics, in special courses on linguoculturology, and also serve to understand the cultural values ​​of a certain people for representatives of another language space.

One of the main categories modern culture is a concept that allows you to overcome the gap between the objective world and the inner mentality of a person, as well as to include in scientific knowledge concepts of irrational knowledge of the world. According to Yu.S. Stepanova, the concept is the main unit of culture in the mental world of a person. A. Vezhbitskaya defines a concept as “an object from the “Ideal” world, which has a name and reflects certain culturally conditioned ideas of a person about the world “Reality”.

The term “concept” itself (from Latin conceptus – “thought”, “concept”), according to the Concise Dictionary of Cognitive Terms, “corresponds to the idea of ​​those meanings that a person operates in the processes of thinking and which reflect the content of experience and knowledge, the content the results of all human activity and the processes of cognition of the world in the form of certain "quanta" of knowledge.

In this regard, a relatively new direction in psycholinguistics and cultural studies has arisen - cognitive linguoculturology, which makes it possible to trace the relationship of linguistic forms with the cultural characteristics of people of different ethnic groups. In this direction, the consciousness of a person, which is directly influenced by the cultural characteristics of his society, also plays an equally important role. In cognitive cultural studies, the concept is presented as a unit of structured and unstructured knowledge, which forms the cognition of an individual and culture as a whole, while culture itself is “the interaction of consciousness with the outside world” . Therefore, the use of a cognitive approach and psycholinguistic methods in tracing the evolution of various concepts and the reconstruction of cultural concepts allows us to gain new knowledge about the formation of a linguistic picture of the world, the peculiarities of thinking of representatives different cultures, the value priorities of the people, as well as the ways of perception and understanding of the surrounding world within a certain cultural society. The connection of the concept with the picture of the world is also emphasized by the authors of the Concise Dictionary of Cognitive Terms, defining it as a term that serves to explain the mental or mental resources of our consciousness and that information structure, which reflects the knowledge and experience of a person; operational meaningful unit of memory, mental lexicon, conceptual system and language of the brain (lingua mentalis), the whole picture of the world reflected in human psyche.

In the monograph "Language Circle: Personality, Concepts, Discourse" Professor V.I. Karasik notes that "the main unit of linguoculturology is the cultural concept - a multidimensional semantic formation in which the value, figurative and conceptual sides are distinguished" . Within the framework of linguoculturology and psycholinguistics, the concept is defined as a unit of individual and collective knowledge, which has a cultural marking and has a linguistic expression. The cultural concept itself is, first of all, a mental entity that reflects the “spirit of the people”.

The reconstruction of the concept in linguoculturology is based on the approaches of Yu. Stepanov, A. Vezhbitskaya and the school of logical analysis of language. Yu.S. Stepanov proposed a semiotic method, which is aimed at analyzing the formation of a cultural concept. This approach is characterized by the involvement of a broad philological and cultural context. According to this technique, cultural concepts are analyzed as a “layered” formation, in which it is first necessary to identify the “literal meaning” of the word (inner form), presented “in the form of etymology”, then the “historical” (passive) layer of the concept, and on last step its actual layer is studied. According to the methodology of A. Vezhbitskaya, the study should begin with the choice of the name of the concept. In this approach, it is important to take into account the frequency of the use of the name and the "cultural development" of the corresponding fragment of the linguistic picture of the world. This method of research also involves the analysis of diverse means of naming concepts. However, a unified approach to the concept research methodology in modern linguistic and cultural studies has not yet been developed.

In our opinion, one of the most preferred methods for reconstructing the concepts of culture is a psycholinguistic technique - associative experiment.

Psycholinguistics, a discipline that emerged in 1953, is located at the intersection of psychology and linguistics and studies the relationship between language, thinking and consciousness.

In psycholinguistics, there are three main methods for collecting linguistic material, which are borrowed from experimental psychology.

1. The method of introspection or self-observation (from Latin introspecto “look inside”) was proposed by W. Wundt. The essence of this method is to observe your own mental processes without the use of tools or standards.

2. Method of observation in vivo- involves the explanation of a mental phenomenon in the process of a specially organized situation of its perception.

3. Experimental method. This method is currently the main research method in psycholinguistics. In turn, it distinguishes several methods, one of which is an associative experiment. association experiment- a term that has established itself in psychology to refer to a special projective method for studying the motivation of a person, which was proposed at the beginning of the 20th century. C. G. Jung and almost simultaneously with him M. Wertheimer and D. Klein.

The procedure for conducting an associative experiment is as follows. Subjects are required to respond to a specific set of stimulus words as quickly as possible with any word that comes to mind. Thus, the type of associations that arise, the frequency of associations of the same type, the magnitude of latent periods (the time between the stimulus word and the subject's response), behavioral and physiological reactions, etc., are recorded.

An association experiment is also often used as a group test, for example, to determine the frequency of use of a particular word or to identify the prevalence of a particular cultural value in a given society.

In this regard, we conducted a psycholinguistic test on the example of representatives of Russian and Tajik culture. We used the associative method or otherwise the psycholinguistic method on the topic "Beauty". Our target audience were students of the branch of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov in Dushanbe, as well as residents of Tajikistan who are not native Russian speakers. The experiment involved 25 people.

These persons were asked to write all the associations, including sayings, proverbs, phraseological units that arise with the word beauty, in Russian and Tajik languages, with the inherent characteristics of Russian and Tajik culture. Here we have listed all the associations that we received during the study (Table 1.).

Table 1. Associative experiment on the example of the word "beauty".

the beauty
Associations in Russian	Associations in the Tajik language
Mum	Modar
Motherland	Tajikistan
Take care of yourself	boodob
Happy appearance	Khushbakhti
Young woman	Muihoi daroz
Love	Ishq
Painting	tabiat
Irresistibility	Parichehr
Spring	Bahori olamaphruz
Flower	Gulu khushby
God	Khudoi boloi sar
Save the world	Zebogii zohiri
Inner beauty	Zebogii shoes
Smile	Chehrai kushod
Child's laugh	Khandai back
New Year	Navruz
Money	Boygari
Strength and power	Zebogiidiққatҷalbkunanda
Speech (the way a person speaks)	Sukhani widths
Style	Libosi Shinnam (zebo)
A life	Zindagi oromona
Religion	Islam
Deception	Zebogii fitnaangesis
The look and eyes of a loved one	Nigohi bomekhri dustdoshta
The birth of a new life (the birth of a child)	Nigohi back ba modare, ki oro ba dunyo ovard
Proverbs and sayings
Oftob ham [dar ruyash] dog dorad	There are lees to every wine
Zog ҳam megyad, ki farzandi man az ҳama zebotar	To all people, their mind seems clear, and their child beautiful
Modarro Binu Duhtarro intihob kun	First look at the mother, then choose her daughter
Bo zaboni shirin mor az sӯrokh baromada	An affectionate word breaks a bone; a kind word is better than a soft one pirogue
Poem by Omar Khayyam
in Tajik	Translation in Russian
Yo slave, tu ҷamoli in mahi mehrangez, Omekhtai ba sumbuli barn. Pass hukm hamekuni ki bar wai manigar, Ying hukm chunon buwad Ki kaҷ doru marez .	My God, you gave pomegranate breasts to beauties, And gave them lips beautiful as a precious emerald. Welishafter that we don't look at them It's like being dry diving into a pond.

In applied psycholinguistics, associative dictionaries have been created on the basis of an associative experiment. It should also be noted that most of the reactions given in the associative dictionaries were obtained mainly from university and college students aged 17 to 25 (in this case, the stimulus words were given in the native language of the subjects). The first associative dictionary is the Dictionary of Associative Norms of the Russian Language, which was compiled by a team of authors led by Alexei Alekseevich Leontiev. At the moment, the most complete dictionary of this type is the "Russian Associative Dictionary" by Yuri Nikolaevich Karaulov, Yuri Alexandrovich Sorokin, Evgeny Fedorovich Tarasov, Natalya Vladimirovna Ufimtseva. It consists of approximately 1300 stimulus words.

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Psycholinguistics has inherited many "universal" methods ( FOOTNOTE: The method is defined in science as a set of methods and operations of cognition and practical transformation of reality. A technique is a specific version of a particular method aimed at solving a specific research problem.) practical psychology and created her own. The most informative and objectively reliable is experimental method, which consists in organizing a targeted study of any aspects of speech activity and language signs. Along with this, observation, self-observation and various formative methods are used in psycholinguistics (123, 246, etc.). As A. A. Leontiev (139) points out, any experiment is aimed at putting the subject in a situation of "controlled choice", although the choice and decision may be unconscious. The experimenter leaves unchanged all the factors influencing the choice and decision of the subject in a given situation, except for the factor that is the subject of this study. However, the experiment in psycholinguistics has its own specifics, which affects the effectiveness of the use of this technique. In the course of organizing a laboratory experiment, a person, as it were, breaks out of his usual environment and finds himself in a situation artificially created for him. At the same time, it is considered that only the studied phenomenon is the main one; other factors that control human behavior are not taken into account (although, of course, they continue to operate). These factors are related to each other, so the introduction of a new factor can affect both the final result and other factors (21, 246, etc.). To improve the effectiveness of psycholinguistic experiments, various experimental methods are used and then the data obtained with their help are compared in the framework of a comprehensive study.