The Transformation in Language and Culture of Russian Speaking Israelis Reflected in the Free Associations Sets
This paper reports on the association experiment conducted among Russian-Hebrew bilinguals. As the basis of the experiment we used a list of 112 stimuli-words that form the core of the Slavic Association Dictionary, thus we are able to compare our data with free associations received from Russian speakers in the Russian Federation. The comparison of association sets, responses to the stimulus-word dengi (money) from different Russian association dictionaries with our data enabled us to trace and clarify the evolution of the lexical meaning and changes in the content of the concept connected with the word. Our analyses reveal the difference in the mental representation of the word meaning and the concept structure between Russian speakers from RF and Israel. We also discuss some peculiarities of the Russian language and culture in Israel.