THE INFLUENCE OF GENDER, AGE AND PROFESSION-RELATED DIFFERENCES ON THE VERBAL BEHAVIOR OF THE SUBJECTS OF ASSOCIATION

This paper presents the results of the free association test with the stimulus word ?playfulness?. The respondents (2,902 people) gave 13,817 separate response words, including 2,493 words that occurred only once, 551word combinations or full sentences. The analysis of the received response words (reactions) allowed us to create an associative field of the word “playfulness”. The association patterns prove onvincingly that in terms of its functioning, “playfulness” is a relevant lexeme in the bilingual linguistic consciousness of Ukrainian people. At the current stage of the experiment, the representative statistical sample of 1,600 people chosen by the criteria of “gender’, “age” and “profession type” revealed both common and peculiar features in the verbal behavior of different groups of respondents. A big number of singular individual reactions (1,101) points out the necessity to take into consideration individual perceptions of the denotative meaning of the stated word when defining its psycholinguistic meaning. The prospect of further research in this field suggests the interpretation of the obtained associative reactions as linguistic representations of semantic components of the stimulus word “playfulness”.