Associative Dictionaries as an Ethnic Mental Phenomenon: Basic Values in the Core of Ethnic Group Language Consciousness Ассоциативные словари как этноментальный феномен: базовые ценности в ядре языкового сознания этноса

Introduction. Associative research is widely practiced in the field of sciences related to linguistics as an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the relationship of language with consciousness, psyche, and human culture; the corpus of associative data we have created in the Kazakh language replenishes associative lexicography in the context of broad intercultural comparisons. 
Materials and methods. The dictionaries of the associative norms of the Kazakh language (Dmitryuk, 1978; Dmitryuk, Moldalieva et al., 2014), prepared on the basis of data of free associative experiments (SAE) with 1000 Kazakh students, contain unique information about the mentality and ethnocultural characteristics of the Kazakh ethnic group in the Soviet and modern period. 
FAE is a well-known method of employing the associative experiment data, the reliable way to access a person’s linguistic consciousness; statistical processing of the FAE body associative data provided for the analytical comparison of a hierarchical sequence of the Kazakh basic values as a linguistic consciousness core – its central and peripheral zones – in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. 
Results. Due to the diachronic and interethnic comparative analysis: such basic Kazakh values as religion beliefs, freedom, sovereignty, state symbols have been subjected to the significant changes; ethnic cultural kernel preferences remained traditionally unchanged, constituting the specific essence of the ethnic national mentality: attitude to motherland, mother, elders, men, gender and age as specific peculiarities in the hierarchy of family relations. 
Conclusions. The intralingua comparison of the dictionaries’ contents revealed a very stable body of unchanging value priorities, indicating a fairly strong core and a significant vitality degree of Kazakh society. 
The work contributes to the intercultural associative research, associative lexicography and provides for the development of promising research in Psycholinguistics in Kazakhstan.


History of Association Studies
Associative direction in the study of speech activity -acting speech process and speech perception, mechanisms of its management, the organization of lexicon and storage of vocabulary in human memory, and others -has a long research history, represented by well-known followers and schools, providing a great theoretical and methodological base and reliable experimental grounds for further research, later driven by the challenges of the 21 st century. meanings in his mind which are relevant, but not identical," i.e. associations (Humboldt, 1984: 166).
In his seminal essay, Thought and Language, the founder of psychology in Russia Alexander Potenbnya substantiated the idea of a word as a form of thought, highlighting the internal form of the word as "the relation of the content of thought to consciousness" (Potebnya, 1999). The founder of the Kazan school of linguistics Jan Boduen de Courtenay (2017) and his followers, who distinguished associations in terms of similarity and adjacency, distinguished between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic associative organization of lexis and divided the associations into direct linguistic and indirect extralinguistic ones.

The Concept of our Theoretical Research
The concept of our theoretical research is based on the representation of the structure of linguistic consciousness and the theory of speech activity by A.A. Leontyev, where language is invariably understood as a reflection of sociocultural reality (Leontyev, 1993: 16-21). The process of verbal reflection of a person's interaction with the world is presented in linguistic consciousness (LC) in the form of an associative-verbal network (AVN) in the materials of associative dictionaries, fixing the hierarchy of basic values of an ethnic groupthe core of linguistic consciousness. The value of AVD is also due to the fact that it allows one to carry out a diachronic analysis of the living dynamics of the nuclear system within several generations, as we have shown comparing the content of two Kazakh associative dictionaries KRAD (1978) and KAD (2014) when revealing not only a change and transformation of value priorities, but also the presence of invariable ethnocultural basic values of the Kazakh ethnos.

Methods and Techniques of the Research
The twentieth century was marked by the rapid development of the natural sciences and the humanities, at the junction of which peculiar "growth points" began to appear -new discoveries made by the joint efforts of scientists from related sciences. The integration of sciences has spawned new branches of humanitarian knowledge, including psycholinguistics, ethnopsychology, linguoculturology, sociolinguistics, and mentalinguistics.
Currently, the growing interest in the nature of the relationship between language and thinking, language and consciousness, language and culture is also associated with a change in the socio-political situation in the world. Expanding contacts among countries, cultures, and people, respectively, are creating a new, "multicolored" world with a diversity of viewpoints, values, and priorities. This general phenomenon was clearly articulated by E.F. Tarasov in his theory of intercultural communication (Tarasov, 1996(Tarasov, , 1998. According to Tarasov, the main cause of misunderstanding in intercultural communication is explained not so much by the difference between languages but as a mismatch in the national consciousness of communicants (Tarasov, 1998: 30). This opinion is quite common and well developed in the scientific literature: as Vygotsky mentions, the actual process of intercultural communication takes place only in the form of "communication of consciousness" (Vygotsky, 1999) whereas, according to Bakhtin, the dialogue of cultures is not so much a communication of different consciousness but "rather as a communication of images of different cultures within the framework of a single consciousness" (Bakhtin, 1986:16).
In this context, it becomes relevant to address issues about the structure, content, and forms by which the consciousness and the mental vocabulary of a person functions, i.e. the creation of a theory of consciousness and methods for its study. Generally speaking, these research objectives united the commitment of scientists from related branches who were striving to establish principles for a general theory of consciousness and its verification through experimental, in particular associative, methods. So for the first time in the study of language and consciousness, scientists came to the poly semantic and widely discussed term "linguistic consciousness".
We accept Leontiev's definition of linguistic consciousness as fundamental, as the founder of Russian psycholinguistics: "If we understand language as the unity of communication and generalization, as a system of meanings, acting both in the objective and in the verbal form of existence, then the 'linguistic consciousness,' the consciousness considered as mediated by meanings, turns out to be close to the understanding that modern Soviet psychology puts into the concept of image of the world. ... I consider it necessary to emphasize that this concept is by no means identical either to the concept of 'linguistic picture' of the world or to the concept of 'cognitive picture' of the world" (Leontiev, 1993: 18).
A special contribution to the development of the theory of consciousness and the organization of the person's internal vocabulary was made by the Tver Psycholinguistic School led by A.A. Zalevskaya (1980Zalevskaya ( , 2007. Developing a theory of word meaning, Zalevskaya suggests taking an associative approach as a leading trend in the description of meaning. The definition of a word's associative meaning is, as many modern studies show, very promising in identifying ethno specific stereotypes of behavior, basic values of a person and their hierarchy in the linguistic consciousness of an individual and ethnos. We will now consider the essence and purpose of associative methods in psycholinguistic research.

The Free Associative Experiment as the Principle Research Method of the Language Consciousness
One of the most accessible and reliable methods of studying linguistic consciousness today is the free associative experiment (FAE), which presents clearly and consistently the content and functioning of different layers of linguistic consciousness, the hierarchy of value ideas about the world, and the existing relationships between words and the concepts reflected in them. FAE sheds light on human linguistic consciousness and subjective-intuitive world outlook, which is not usually perceived by the native speakers and is not revealed by other research methods.
An associative experiment (AE) is a psychological tool aimed at identifying associations that an individual has developed in his previous experience. Associations can be verbal and nonverbal -subject, color, musical, odor, taste, etc. The associative experiment method has been widely used in psychology; it later proved to be a reliable tool in psycholinguistics, for example, to explore the psychological, categorical, and substantive meaning of words (as practiced by Postman, 1970;Russel & Jenkins, 1954;Vygotsky, 1996;Leontiev, 1993;Zalevskaya, 2007, et al.). AE offers a means to study images of consciousness, which are "made external" (as per Tarasov) by verbal associations © Dmitryuk Natalya & Abramova Galina (Tarasov, 1998;Goroshko, 2001;Ufimtseva, 2020;Balyasnikova, Dmitryuk & Ufimtseva, 2020, et al.), and is also of great assistance in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies in Russia and Kazakhstan (as per Zalevskaya, 1971Zalevskaya, , 1980Cherkasova, 2005;Dmitryuk, 2012;Abramova, 2006;Gizdatov, 1997, and others).
Initially, association experiments were conducted by foreign psychologists and psychiatrists to examine the processes of perception, recollection, formation of concepts, generalizations, and other trends (as per Jung, 1919;Russell & Jenkins, 1954, and others).
Linguists borrowed free associative experiment (FAE) methodology from K. Jung's (1919), psychiatric research, currently this method is one of the simplest and the most effective ways to study linguistic consciousness. In this methodology, a large number of respondents (from 500 to 1000 or more) are offered to respond to word-stimuli (S) with the first associations that come to mind, known as the associative reactions (R). Psychologists created the first dictionaries of associative norms that helped the psychiatrists to establish "normality" or "abnormality" of the patient's mental health. This technique was adopted and used by the psycholinguists.

Dictionaries of the Associative Norms
The "Minnesota Norms" published by W.A.  was the first widely known dictionary of associative norms in English providing the background for many similar studies.
"Word Association Norms," edited by L. Postman, is of great interest to many researchers, as it includes almost all the associative norms collected earlier in English, French, and German (Postman, 1970). The lists of stimulus words are mainly based on a list of one hundred words by G. Kent and A. Rozanoff (2006), the methodology, conditions for conducting FAE, and the number of informants is also traditional.
Another publication, "Associative Thesaurus of the English Language" (Kiss et al., 1972) is widely popular with linguists, psychologists, and cultural scientists. It includes not only data on "direct" associative relationships (i.e. from stimulus S to reaction R), but also the data on "feedback" links (i.e. all words that triggered the same word as a response). The method of "joining" the associative verbal network, the nature of the results and the possibility of using this thesaurus for different purposes were discussed in detail by Zalevskaya (2007).
The theory of meaning was widely discussed among foreign linguists in the last century due to the great psycholinguists' interests in association studies. Among the more problematic issues discussed were the associative meaning of the word, and the organization of the human lexicon. Associations in this regard are considered a means of access to the internal human vocabulary (or to linguistic consciousness); they also may serve as a means of forming the hierarchy of the human core values and the ethnos as a whole -i.e. the core language consciousness (according to the terminology of the Moscow Psycholinguistic school) or the core mental lexicon (according to the terminology of the Tver Psycholinguistic school).
The second half of the 20 th century was distinguished by widespread work in experimental association research, resulting in the creation of a series of associative dictionaries (using the Kent-Rosanoff list of stimuli): German, French, and Italian (Rosenzweig, 1961), Russian (Leontiev, 1977), Bulgarian (Gerganov, 1984), Ukrainian (Butenko, 1979;Martinek, 2007Martinek, , 2008, Byelorussian (Tsitova, 1981), Latvian (Ulyanov, 1988), Kirgiz (Titova, 1975), Kazakh (Dmitryuk, 1978), and other languages. In particular we should mention the Ukrainian Associative Dictionary by S. Martinek (2007Martinek ( , 2008, in which "for the first time in associative lexicographic practice, the reactions of male and female respondents are presented separately, which makes it possible to use its materials for gender studies; in general, the materials of the dictionary help to reveal the culturally specific features of the conceptual picture of the world, embodied in the Ukrainian language" (Martinek, 2007).
An extensive bibliography of associative studies is presented in the work of E.I. Goroshko, and provides for systematization and classification of existing associative dictionaries, highlights the applied aspects of associative lexicography, describes in detail the model of the associative thesaurus as a powerful tool in social research, while the associative-verbal network of the thesaurus is thought of as another way of representing language, correlated with the linguistic ability of its speaker (Goroshko 2001: 158-197).
The associative experiments is also successfully used for didactic purposes: in the process of learning to master vocabulary (Baydak et al., 2015;Bekova, 2013), for exploring the memory associative structure in the perception and interpretation of the unknown foreign words, and to study the problems of bilingualism (Lubimova, 2020;Mukhametzyanova & Shayakhmetova, 2014;Kheirzadeh & Hajiabed, 2016), to study the sociocultural stereotypes and the specifics of the linguistic consciousness (Raible, 2003;Izbasarov et al., 2017;Sharifian, 2017), to study the mechanisms of speech perception in the paradigm of activity psycholinguistics (Kharchenko, 2017).
By now, a solid methodological basis for the study of associations has already been formed, the main classical provisions of the theory of associations have been identified, various classifications of types of associations have been created depending on the principles and different bases of their analysis, etc.

Adherence to Ethical Standards
The article was ethically approved at a meeting of the Council of the Philological Faculty of the South Kazakhstan State Pedagogical University.
For conduct of this research no funds, grants or other support was received.
The authors do not have any financial or property interests concerning the materials presented in this article.

Association studies in Kazakhstan
In Kazakhstan, the first associative linguistic experiments with native speakers of Russian and Kazakh languages were carried out in the 1960s and 1970s by A.A. Zalevskaya (1971Zalevskaya ( , 1980, and M.M. Kopylenko (1995). They were introduced into the sphere of broad interlinguistic comparisons and shown capable of such tasks as identifying the socio-cultural influences in perception, mapping linguistic images of the world, modeling verbal memory, displaying the center and periphery of the inner lexicon, and classing the mental and lingua cultural "climate" of a particular society.
Further associative researches based on the materials of the Kazakh and Russian languages in Kazakhstan linguistics were initiated by N.V. Dmitryuk (1978Dmitryuk ( , 2012 and others, and G.G. Gizdatov (1997).
Associative psycholinguistic experiments based on associative techniques gained momentum in Kazakhstan at the beginning of the 21 st century, proving useful in addressing issues of socio cultural identification and communication.

Kazakh Associative Dictionaries
Currently, the object of the research in the article is a content study of two associative dictionaries of the Kazakh language: The Kazakh-Russian Associative Dictionary - KRAD-1978(Dmitryuk, 1978 and Kazakh Associative Dictionary -KAD-2014 (Dmitryuk, Moldaliyeva et al., 2014) in a comparative aspect. A short information about the dictionary is given below.
The Kazakh-Russian Associative Dictionary (KRAD-1978) published information derived from FAEs conducted in 1975-1976. In these FAEs, questionnaires were given to the native Kazakh students from different universities in Shymkent, Kazakhstan, approximately 1000 respondents. The word-stimuli list in the questionnaire was based on Kent and Rosanoff's word list, which was an accepted international practice for FAE and later translated into Kazakh.
Compiled in accordance with the generally accepted international practice requirements for the conduct of FAE, KRAD-1978 is a fairly objective picture of the linguistic consciousness of the "average" native Kazakh language speaker in the last decades of the Soviet period, it has translations of stimuli and reaction-associations into the Russian language for the convenience of using it. KRAD-1978 "expands the possibilities of cross-language comparative analysis of verbal associations, which are considered as models of speech knowledge native speakers and reflect not only semantic and grammatical relationships within the language, but also are a fragment of the images of consciousness, human verbal memory" (Dmitryuk, 1978: 5-27).
A detailed description of the methodology for conducting the SAE, the choice of subjects, the problems of translating stimulus words and responses into the Kazakh language and the construction of a dictionary entry in KRAS-1978 is presented in the Preface to the dictionary.
The second Қазақша ассоциациялық сөздік / Kazakh Associative Dictionary (KAD-2014) was based on a series of FAEs conducted © Dmitryuk Natalya & Abramova Galina in 2012-2013, again using Kazakh students from South Kazakhstan. Over 1.000 respondents participated in the experiment, with an approximately equal number of male and female. This was the first time in the practice of compiling such dictionaries that gender-based systematization was used; over 120.000 male and female associative responses are presented in a tabular form on the same word-stimuli, thereby determining the language consciousness gender-specific in an individual and society as a whole.
By comparing the incentive words of the two associative Kazakh dictionaries, we see that a quarter of the list of words of the related questionnaires coincide with one another. This is important for comparing differences in perception of meanings and concepts among ethnic groups; for example, it is noteworthy to compare concepts marked and unmarked by ethnic, social, gender and other parameters to identify both the differences and commonalities of their perceptions and understanding. At the same time, similar incentive words in the FAE questionnaires are not required to determine world image consistency among different ethnic groups in order to reveal the central, most meaningful, and peripheral zones of lexical formation. According to N. Ufimtseva, this factor is of no particular importance for identifying the core of linguistic consciousness: "…Comparing the Russian sections…of the Slavic Associative Dictionary with the Russian Associative Dictionary, we can see that only seven of 30 words are not included in the 'big core' of Russian linguistic consciousness. This once again confirms what was noted when analyzing the Russian Associative Dictionary: that any sufficiently large list of stimulus words (at least 50) leads to the same core of linguistic consciousness for each given culture, i.e. to the concepts central to a given image of the world in their relation to each other, i.e. in their consistency. One may assume that the systematic nature and content of the core linguistic consciousness reflect the systematic nature and content of ethnic constants existing in the collective unconscious" (Ufimtseva, 2000: 217).
The data of both Kazakh associative dictionaries thus match those of similar studies, which opens the door to wider cross-language and cross-cultural comparisons. For this purpose, the authors have translated the KADs into Russian (though with the caveat that translation is not an exact science). The two dictionaries provide unique insight into how two generations of Kazakh youth perceive their world within a specific socio-cultural context. The dictionaries can thus serve as a tool of ethno-linguistic, cultural, and socio-psychological studies of the mental environment of two generations of native Kazakh speakers.
The objective of our ethnic psycholinguistic and socio-cultural research is a diachronic analysis of native Kazakh speakers during the Soviet period and in the present day. As the subject of study we examined features of transformation of basic values in the linguistic consciousness of the respondents. The associated reactions of the two generations of Kazakhs, presented in the form of an associative-verbal network (AVN) in direct dictionaries (from stimulus to reaction) served as a basis for distinguishing inverse dictionaries (from reactions to the stimulus) for determining central values -basic values that make up the core of the language consciousness of native Kazakh speakers as a dynamic process in the evolutionary development of their culture and civilization. Having created the core of linguistic consciousness, our goal was

The Core of Linguistic Consciousness
The core concept in linguistics, as borrowed from the natural sciences, has long acquired the status of a particular "center," as opposed to the periphery in the hierarchy of compared gradual phenomena. Examples would include the lexical and statistical core of the dictionary, the core of the general vocabulary of related languages, the core of the active vocabulary of the national language, among others. Traditionally, in the psycholinguistic research using FAE and similar techniques, the core concept acquires a specific meaning. In these cases, the core is considered the most frequently reproduced association-reaction (R) in response to the stimulus words (S) proposed in the experiment. At the same time, there are different methods for compiling such a core: with the advent of computer technology and digital capabilities for processing associative materials, new ways of identifying response frequency began to emerge.
New statistical methods appeared for calculating not only the direct nature of association (from stimulus to reaction: S→R), but also the inverse one (from reaction to stimulus: R→S), which made it possible to determine the mutual attraction of stimuli and reactions. This makes some sense -the greater the number of stimuli generating identical reactions, the greater number of connections revealed in the associativeverbal network (AVN), that is why some researchers build the core according to the number of the stimuli generated (i.e. connections) without taking into account the frequency of response associations. Response frequency cannot be ignored, however, so there is another option to build the core using the maximum response frequency by the same word-association within the entire AVN. In our studies of the Soviet period (Dmitryuk, 1978), we also made an attempt to identify the core words -the first 10 and 30 most common high-frequency words (associations and stimuli) -by computer-based statistical processing in the entire body of association reactions in the direct dictionary KRAD-1978.

Intraethnic Diachronic Study of the Kazakh Language Consciousness
Along with the generally accepted comparative studies of intercultural and inter-ethnic nature in psycholinguistics, we must mention the heuristic and promising aspects of the intra-ethnic research of the linguistic consciousness, which are of certain interest, because a comparison of the ethnic group with itself is observed in a diachronic aspect -Kazakhs are compared with Kazakhs, and Russians -with Russians in different time periods; i.e. when the ethnic linguistic consciousness and mentality transformations is intuitively recognized but it demands the thorough scientific justification.
Such studies have recently become widely popular in the European and Russian psycholinguistics, where free association experiments were conducted long before and the dictionaries of association norms of different languages have been created on their basis. For example, at present, five associative dictionaries of the Russian language of different periods have already been created, and Russian scientists have the opportunity to compare on their basis how much the value orientations and the mental climate of the Russian ethnos have changed in different eras. As far as the Kazakh mentality presented in the prism of association studies is concerned, there also is a unique opportunity of the similar intra-ethnic diachronic comparison based on the two mentioned Kazakh associative dictionaries of Soviet and modern period. To expand the viewing area of the studied conceptual values, their hierarchy and analysis of the specific content we turn to the comparison of the content of 'big' core of the Kazakh language consciousness, compiled on the material of direct and inverse Kazakh association dictionaries of the Soviet and modern period.
The representativeness of the dynamics of the Kazakhs language consciousness in the Soviet and modern period we shall demonstrate on the example of the 'big' core of the language consciousness based on KRAD-1978 and KAD-2014 materials; they include the first 100 words, recorded in the active associative speech body of widely popular vocabulary of the Kazakh language, functioning in the language consciousness of two generations of the titular ethnos of Kazakhstan in different periods (Tabl. 1, 2). Above, we have already described the essence and method of "constructing" the core of linguistic consciousness on the basis of direct (from stimulus -S to response -R) and reverse (from response -R to stimulus -S) connections in associative dictionaries. A.A. Zalevskaya (1980), and after her, N.V. Ufimtseva (2000), build the core of the lexicon (in the terminology of A.A. Zalevskaya (1980), and the core of linguistic consciousness (in the terminology of N.V. Ufimtseva (Ufimtseva & Balyasnikova, 2019;Ufimtseva, 2020) according to the number of S-stimuli that generated these associations. G. A. Cherkasova (2005), consistently tracing the dynamics of changes in the number of reactions, proved the existence of "constant" and "probabilistic" responses, determining their number, at which all stimuli will be completely connected in the network. This amount turned out to be the number of 70-75 words, which amounted to 95.0% of the array of any associative dictionary.
So, let's imagine the two cores of linguistic consciousness of the Kazakhstan ethnos in diachronic aspect in Tables 1 and 2. The first column indicates the rank of the association; the second presents the association itself with translation into Russian, and the third column shows the decreasing frequency stimulus hierarchy that caused this association, the fourth column shows the number of these reactions in the whole body of the associative dictionary. As we noted above, one can also structure the core according to the frequency of reactions by interchanging the 4 (R) and 3 (S) columns: at the same time, by arranging the reactions in decreasing frequency, we can make sure that the rank of some associations will change, but in general the main composition of the associates will remain unchanged both in the small (30 words) and the large core of consciousness (75-100 words). With this approach, in the conceptual center (the first 10 words) in the Kazakh core of consciousness, 7 of the significant values presented in tables will remain: adam (man), үlken (big), jaқsy (good), aқ (white), әdemi (beautiful), бала (child), kөп (many); instead of өмір (life), ана (mother), жер (earth), which will go down to the 12th, 19th and 23rd places, there aspan (sky), baқyt (happiness), kerek (necessary) will appear. Therefore, we join the opinion of researchers who believe that there is no big and fundamental difference in the formation of the core according to the frequency of reactions decreasing or to the frequency of stimuli that caused these reactions.

Discussions
Different scientific opinions exist about the choice of methodology, objectives, and core design. The mental lexicon core was first identified by A.A. Zalevskaya based on Kiss' English Associative Dictionary (Kiss et al., 1972) in connection with her proposed concept of the word as a means of access to a single human information base (Zalevskaya, 1971(Zalevskaya, , 1980.
The trend emerged of highlighting the active core in the organization of the human mental lexicon in associative studies and was productively used in a variety of ways -examples include identifying the national and cultural identity and systematic characteristics of linguistic consciousness images (Ufimtseva & Balyasnikova, 2019;Ufimtseva, 2020;Balyasnikova, Dmitryuk & Ufimtseva, 2020), establishing the semantic dominant of the linguistic personality of the child (Sokolova, 1999), studying the features of preschoolers' and primary school students' images of the world (Ovchinnikova et al., 2000), Kazakhs, Russians and English (Abramova, 2006) and determining the characteristics of verbal behavior in professional communication (Kharchenko, 2003), and in the intercultural communication (Balyasnikova et al., 2018; et al. In one form or another, researchers strove to identify the most relevant core of the associative-verbal net-work, which could include a certain number (10 to 100) units that differ in degree of "attraction" to the high-frequency center -from the most active (10 words, which is the "conceptual center" of core linguistic consciousness * ) to the least active (30 words, considered the "small" core) and, further approaching the periphery, an arbitrary number of associates from 75 to 100 units, which is considered to be a "large" core of linguistic consciousness.
* For comparison, we present the Laurent List, well known to specialists in general semantics, which names ten values that form a kind of system of rods on which the consciousness of the individual and society rests: God, Motherland, banner, duty, honor, friendship, tenderness, death, life, hope.
In addition, a simple comparison of the lists of words included in the core of linguistic consciousness is uninformative. The coincidence of the words-correlates in different linguistic cultures and even their equally high rank in the core of consciousness do not ensure complete coincidence or closeness of ideas about the named subject. Representatives of different ethnic groups and generations can have completely different Ideas of friend and friendship, home and family, of homeland and duty, even if these conceptually significant units of the mental lexicon were found in the central zone of the core of linguistic consciousness.
"Two words in two different languages, denoting the same object in the cultures of the two peoples and being translated equivalents, inevitably turn out to be non-identical in content, enriched with a kind of associations conditioned by national culture, specific images of consciousness" (Dmitryuk, 2012: 83).
Presenting the material in the Tables we demonstrate some similarities and differences in the content of the mental lexicon of the Kazakh ethnic group in different historical periods of its life, we will leave to the reader the possibility and the right to self-reflection on the specific hierarchy of values defined in the core language consciousness of two generations of Kazakhs. We can assume that basic values such as attitude to religion, freedom, sovereignty, to national symbols, and so have undergone predictable changes in consciousness and mentality of the Kazakh ethnic group during the post-socialist period.
However, in our opinion, certain value preferences, ethno cultural core values, rules of behavior, not subjected to time change and contributing to the preservation of the viability and vitality of society can and must exist. Tradition and permanence of certain ethno cultural basic elements that make up the essence of the specific features of the national character and ethnos mentality: the attitude to the homeland and to one's mother, to seniors, to a man, the gender and age characteristics in the hierarchy of family and kinship relations, etc. possibly may be predictably immutable. However, we will define this topic for ourselves as an object of a separate study and take it beyond the scope of this article.

Conclusions
(1). The original material obtained in the field experimental research with the native Kazakh culture bearers expands the range of cross-language and intercultural comparisons and replenishes a body of the associative data for the different world languages.
(2). The free associative experiment, recognized by the international scientific community as the primary means of an access to the linguistic consciousness occupies in our research the central place and it provides for the quite reliable and valid results of the field experimental research.
(3). Kazakh association dictionaries (KRAD-1978 andKAD-2014) compiled on the original material of associative experiments carried out in the Soviet period and nowadays are of the scientific interest, as they reflect the image of the Kazakh verbalized fragments of consciousness and can be used to study the national cultural specificity of mentality and worldview by the representatives of two generations of the Kazakh nation, including the context of the broad cross-language comparisons.
(4). The study of the content and the transformation of ethnic mental basic values which are structured in the ethnic language consciousness core in a certain hierarchical sequence as the most significant, is of great interest, especially in our epoch when a trend of substitution of traditional national values by various types of universal and other benefits of civilization is manifested.
(5). In our opinion the associative direction can become very promising in Kazakhstan's psycholinguistics, which will be associated, firstly, with the identification of the area of coincidence of associative reactions -the determination of ethnic constants, a certain unchanging rod in the collective consciousness of an ethnic group over a certain period of time; secondly, with the fixation of a certain area of changethe transformation and reformation of the linguistic consciousness of the titular ethnic group of Kazakhstan in the post-Soviet, post-reform and modern periods, which, of course, is not only of linguistic interest, but is also associated with the study of a wide range of social, ethno cultural and political issues of our time.