SUMMARY
The article is devoted to the psycholinguistic peculiarities description of understanding phraseological units by older pre-school age children, who speak Ukrainian. The results were received experimentally on the base of children’s speech observation. Finding out of perception peculiarities and phraseme understanding of pre-school children age was done with the usage of author’s research methodology of children’s states and development level to understand phraseological units. The aim of this methodology lies in finding out how pre-school children can understand the figurative meaning of phraseological units. According to this methodology children are asked to tell how they understand given to them phraseological units. If they have difficulties in meaning explication then they are proposed to choose some variants of phraseological units interpretations, among which the first one is correct (figurative meaning), and the second one is a direct meaning, but the third is a random associative meaning. Psychological analysis of children’s answers with the usage of different empirical methods like children’s speech observation, semantic analysis of children’s expressions, content-analysis, testing, children’s poll, method on valuation understanding on phraseological units figurative meaning, these all let us find out four development levels in listening and understanding of phraseological units by children of older pre-school age and they are – sufficient level, middle level, not sufficient and potential levels. To the sufficient level of understanding of phraseological units in listening we refer children, who are able to prove the understanding of figurative meaning not by explaining their meaning but while choosing the meaning variant among which there were those, that had direct meaning of a component of the phraseological unit. To the middle level of listening understanding of the phraseological units of children, we refer those children, who mostly understood denotative meaning of component-words, which make phraseological units but did not explain the figurative meaning of phraseological units. Nevertheless, they show ability to find out phraseological meaning from the number of given meaning variants. To the not sufficient level of phraseological units listening understanding we refer children’s elementary attitude to them and their ability to explain some direct meanings of phraseological units’ component-words. While understanding phraseological units, most children had accidental associations, far from figurative meaning. Children with its potential development formed a separate listening group. They could not understand phraseological units at all and with each verbal attempt kept silence. We could not identify children, who had high level of listening in understanding of phraseological units. The article describes in details psycholinguistic peculiarities of development in listening understanding by children of older pre-school age.