The article presents the results of a psycholinguistic experiment conducted with freshmen of Moscow State University’s School of Philology on November 30, 2016, at a lecture on contemporary urban folklore. The toolkit was a selection of contemporary children’s folklore texts, and not images that are commonly used in such experiments.
Folklore material-based psycholinguistic experiments are not a novelty. This experiment, however, is conceptually different from others as, besides psycholinguistic, it pursued pedagogical and folkloristic goals. The folklore texts used in this experiment were tools and objects of research at the same time.
The results showed that 1) texts and genre forms that have been demonstrated to the participants are geographically loose; 2) some texts are more common than others; 3) each genre has an audience of a certain age; 4) folklore products, which are similar in form or content to folklore products that had been shown, are part of the younger generation’s repertoire rather than the researcher-informant’s repertoire.