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Lexical co-occurrence and association strength

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Abstract

The 1-million-word Brown corpus was searched for co-occurrences of semantically related pairs of concrete nouns appearing within an arbitrary window of 250 characters. Related pairs of nouns (OCEAN-WATER) co-occur significantly more often than matched, unrelated pairs (OCEAN-HAND), and this difference remained significant within blocks of text up to 1000 characters in length. Frequency of co-occurrence, corrected for chance, is significantly correlated with association strength. Lexical distance between co-occurring members of a given pair is inversely correlated with association strength. Significantly more co-occurrences were found, per unit text, in the fictional sections of the corpus.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, 08854, Piscataway, New Jersey

    Donald P. Spence & Kimberly C. Owens

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  1. Donald P. Spence
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  2. Kimberly C. Owens
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Spence, D.P., Owens, K.C. Lexical co-occurrence and association strength. J Psycholinguist Res 19, 317–330 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01074363

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01074363

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