Abstract
Associative frequency, the ease with which a word comes to mind in free association, is taken as a measure of general response availability. As expected from this view, in both controlled experiments and in reanalyses of previously published correlational data, high associative frequency words were judged to be more familiar and were easier to recall but harder to recognize than low associative frequency words, even with meaningfulness, imagery, length in letters, and frequency excluded as factors. When used as foils in a recognition experiment, high associative frequency words attracted more responses than low associative frequency words. In addition, associative frequency and meaningfulness correlated only moderately and had different patterns of correlations with other variables, suggesting that the number of associations leading to and from a word differ.
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Paivio, A.Imagery ratings and other norms for 2,448 words. Unpublished manuscript, University of Western Ontario, 1982.
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Support for this research came from a Duke University Research Council Award.
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Rubin, D.C. Associative asymmetry, availability, and retrieval. Memory & Cognition 11, 83–92 (1983). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197665
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197665