Linguocultural consciousness of youth in the language environment: differences in the perception of verbalizers of the concept "Communication" between monolinguals and bilinguals

The article discusses the results of a double associative experiment conducted among philology students in Russia and Uzbekistan. The aim of the study was to identify the similarities and differences in the linguistic and cultural consciousness of contemporary speakers of the Russian language as a native and non-native language in the domain of the concept of "Communication." The choice of this concept is due to its special relevance in contemporary discourse. Furthermore, the study of a specific fragment of linguistic and cultural consciousness, limited to the lexicon-semantic field of one concept, has so far remained outside the scientific interests of linguists. The subject of the study was the students' reactions to stimulus words within the lexicon-semantic field of the specified concept. Participants from both groups have native-level proficiency in Russian and are philology students aged 18–25. The stimulus words for the experiment's questionnaire were selected using a random word generator, and parameters such as gender, age, and place of study of the participants were included. The interpretation and comparative analysis of the associates obtained through the free associative experiment served as the main research methods. The comparison of fragments of linguistic and cultural consciousness within the framework of the concept of "Communication" determined the novelty of the research. The associative experiment allowed us to establish a common associative field of verbalizers of the concept "Communication" and minor discrepancies between monolinguals and bilinguals. Specifically, the most frequent reaction to the stimulus word "communication" for students in Group 1 is "communication" (16), while in the reactions of Group 2, the meaning "spiritual connection" prevails, emphasizing the importance of the closeness of communicators. The respondents' answers to the stimulus words "communicative" and "to converse" in the two groups are similar. However, when responding to the stimulus word "to converse," participants in Group 2 place a greater emphasis on the second subject of communication, while in Group 1, responses are limited to descriptive terms like "friends," excluding family members. Despite the identified differences, the presence of stable syntagmatic and paradigmatic correlations in both groups confirms a shared understanding of the basic semantics of the studied lexemes, due to the commonality of the lexical meanings of the verbalizers.