SUMMARY
Purpose. The purpose of the research was to present the typical features and individual differences of verbal perception and understanding of COLOR concept by French-speaking Ukrainian students. To realize the goal, we set the task to identify the ethno-cultural specificity of the representation of COLOR concept in the French phraseological picture of the world and analyze the peculiarities of verbal perception of the connotative content of achromatic and polychromatic colors in the composition of phraseological units by students-francophones.Research methods and techniques. The semantic-cognitive method, the psycholinguistic approach (free associative experiment), the technique of frequency-statistical characteristics, the method of component analysis, the linguacultural analysis, the system analysis and the research synthesis were used in the research.Results. According to the results of investigation, the phraseological coloratives are a national realia and a cultural prototype. Color is a specific mental symbol that is verbalized and conveys a certain psychoemotional state of an individual. The coloratives which are directly related to the visual perception of the world constitute a psychoemotional component of the conceptual and linguistic picture of the world. The COLOR concept is actualized by emosems. Among the coloratives of phraseological nominations achromic (white and black) as well as polychrome (blue) are most represented in the psychological consciousness of the French language. Polychrome and achromic colors are correlated with certain emotions, character traits, psychophysical state. It has been established that the French cultural tradition is characterized by bioarchetypic correspondences between individual colors and certain symbolic meanings. A certain psychoemotional state corresponds to a certain color. Thoughts, feelings and associative states of a person are presented in the form of a color palette.Conclusions. As a result of the free associative experiment and the method of analysis of psychosemantics of color names it was established that coloratives were a verbal symbol of carriers of sociocultural information that could reflect the hidden processes and laws of the linguistic picture of the world through the phraseological system. Colors with a negative connotation (74.42%) (red, black, blue, green, white, yellow, pink) predominate over colors with a positive connotation (25.58%) (pink, white, blue, green). The obtained results indicate that to a large extent the association «color – psychoemotional state» in the French phraseological picture of the world coincides with the ideas of Ukrainian students about psychoemotional states expressed by the French phraseologisms. The phraseological fond with color components shows a powerful semantic and cognitive potential, the study of which deserves great attention from linguists, psychologists and psycholinguists on the way to a comprehensive study of human speech activity.