The article deals with the role of the cognitive approach in teaching students foreign vocabulary. The authors note the need to find new approaches to teaching a foreign language, since the development of electronic resources for both teachers and students faces the problem of organizing a significant amount of information in such a way as to track changes in the language: the appearance of neologisms, the development of new meanings in existing lexemes, the disappearance of various words and phrases. If changing grammatical constructions and their use is not critical, since it does not interfere with communication, then the constantly appearing new meanings of words and the expansion of existing meanings require not only attentiveness, but also certain skills for structuring in the mind in order to be further used in the corresponding situation. Based on the approach of cognitive linguistics and considering the most effective systems of exercises, the authors propose the use of the phenomenon of conceptualization in teaching vocabulary using the example of poly-semantic synonyms of the English language — the verbs feel and sense, which belong to the group of perceptual verbs.