The article deals with the specificity of associations to nouns with a high degree of abstractness and concreteness. Nouns were selected from the created database of abstractness/concreteness ratings of the Russian language; associations were selected from the Russian associative dictionary of Yu.N. Karaulov. The research shows that firstly, verbal associations are one of the main mechanisms involved in language processing, and secondly, abstractness/concreteness plays a key role in generating associations. The paper provides a statistical analysis of 20-25 associations to 50 abstract and 50 concrete nouns, 10 most frequent associations to each word were analyzed in detail and classified into groups according to the type of relations with stimulus words, also each of the selected associations was analyzed for abstractness/concreteness degree using the created database, which allowed making important conclusions about the nature of the context in which the abstract and concrete lexemes occur. The analysis performed in the work allows to reveal the specificity of abstract and concrete nouns in terms of semantic structure of words, to reveal the facts of intersection of concrete and abstract meanings in the structure of the studied lexemes. Moreover, the study makes it possible to test the psycholinguistic theory of context availability on the material of the Russian language by statistical methods. The conclusions presented in the work, based on the linguistic material, correlate with the studies, in which neurobiological mechanisms of perception of concrete and abstract words are studied.