The article is devoted to the study of personal names from a cognitive point of
view. The study is based on the cognitive concept that speech actually exists not in
the speech, not in linguistic writings and dictionaries, but in consciousness, in the
mental lexicon, in the language of the brain. The conditions for identifying personal names can encompass not only the context, encyclopedias, and reference
books, but also the sound form of the word. In the communicative process, during
a free associative experiment, which included a name and a recipient’s mental
lexicon. The recipient was assigned a task to quickly give some association to the
name. The aggregate of a certain number of reactions of different recipients forms
the associative field of a proper name. The associative experiment creates the best
conditions for identifying the lexeme. The definition of a monosemantic personal
name primarily includes the search of what it denotes, while during the process of identifying a polysemantic personal name recipients tend have different reactions.
Scientific value is posed by the effect of the choice of letters for the name, sound
symbolism, etc. The following belong to the generalized forms of identification:
usage of a hyperonym; synonyms and periphrases or simple descriptions; associations denoting the whole (name stimulus) by reference to its part (associatives);
cognitive structures such as “stimulus — association” and “whole (stimulus) —
part (associative)”; lack of adjacency; mysterious associations. The topicality of
the study is determined by its perspective to identify the directions of associative
identification of proper names, which is one of the branches of cognitive onomastics. The purpose of the study is to identify, review, and highlight the directions of
associative identification of proper names; the object of the research is the names
in their entirety and variety; its subject is the existence of names in the mental
lexicon, which determines the need for singling out the directions for the associative identification of the personal names.
