At present time, one of the most important directions in linguistics is the study of the linguistic consciousness of man, the tradition of research of which goes back to the ideas of W. von Humboldt about the link between the language and the spirit of the people. Among the methods of research of linguistic consciousness, one distinguishes an associative experiment, which is a survey of the informants united by some commonality (language, profession, territory of residence, etc.) for revealing their associations-reactions to a certain stimulus. The following methods of linguistic analysis were used in the paper: generalization and systematization, analytical method, descriptive, comparative methods, and also the method of association experiment, etc.The association experiments with 500 students of the city of Kazan, the native speakers of the Tatar language,were conductedIn the course of the research. The results were compared with the materials of the “The Slavic Associative Dictionary” (2004).This paper analyzes and identifies the general and specific features of the associative fields of the lexemes “Ñш”in the Tatar language and “работа”/“work” in the Russian language. An analysis of the responses received by the respondents showed that the associative fields of the lexemes “Ñш” in Tatar and“работа”/“work” in Russian coincided in general. However, Tatar native speakers have more associations with the components of the meaning “Ñ‚Ñжелый”/ “heavy”, “трудноÑÑ‚ÑŒ”/“difficulty”, etc., often characterizing physical labour. Russian-speaking young people more often associate their future with comfortable mental work indoors.The associations of Russian speakers are distinguished by a wide variety of associates with negative connotations, reduced stylistic characteristics, and the use of answers of paremiological origin.Thus, the association experiment allows of revealing the content systemacyof thetypeofconsciousness behind the word in different languages, and confirms the uniqueness, the inimitability of the image of the world of each culture. The research to have been carried out has practical significance, since the obtained results are a valuable and sufficiently reliable material for studying certain fragments of linguistic consciousness, national-specific phenomena, knowledge, value orientations, and so on.
