DOI 10.51955/23121327_2022_3_142

А. А. Natpit

The subject of the article is the problem of forming the mental lexicon of Tuvan bilinguals. The experience of conducting a free associative experiment among Tuvan bilinguals and Russian monolinguals is presented, as well as the results of a survey on the most frequently used nouns in the speech of Tuvans. For the first part of the experiment, 10 most frequently encountered words in Russian were selected by interviewing Tuvan respondents to monitor the reactions of Tuvan and Russian informants to them. The conclusions are: 1) russian words give access to two mental lexicons at once – Russian and Tuvan; 2) monolinguals are dominated by syntagmatic reactions in Russian, while bilinguals have paradigmatic reactions even in Tuvan; 3) the number of updated links in bilinguals is greater than in monolinguals; 4) some connections among bilinguals are completely identical to those of monolinguals, but they are in the minority.

Key words: bilingualism, associative word content, Tuvan language, stimulus words.

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