Mental Representations of "Road" and "Path" at the Comparative Aspect

Mental representation, as a specific cognitive model which is associated with the human perception of the world and represents a unit of such perception, reflects the existence of a certain coding format or an inner (mental) model within human consciousness. Identification of the psychological meaning of the crucial mental representations, as well as their consideration at a comparative aspect, enables students to overcome a number of ethical-psycho-linguistic difficulties in their perception of the ethical images of a foreign culture in the process of learning a foreign language. This article quotes the results of the experiment revealing figurative and emotional contents of the mental representation of the "road" in the Russian students' mind and in that of the Chinese student audience.