The constructs of semantic and associative relatedness have played a prominent role in research on semantic memory because researchers have historically drawn on the distinction between these two types of relations when formulating theories, creating experimental conditions, and explaining empirical results. We argue that the binary distinction between semantics and association is rooted in a fundamental problem in how the two are defined and contrasted. Whereas semantic relatedness has typically been limited to category coordinates, associative relatedness has most often been operationalized using the word association task. We show that meaningful semantic relations between words/concepts certainly extend beyond category coordinates, that word association is driven primarily by meaningful semantic relations between cue and response words, and that non-meaningful, purely associative relations between words generally are not retained in memory. To illustrate these points, we discuss research on semantic priming, picture naming, and the Deese-Roediger-McDermott false memory paradigm. Furthermore, we describe how research on the development of mnemonic skills in adolescents supports our view. That is, adolescents do not learn arbitrary associations between words, but develop elaborative strategies for linking words by drawing on their rich knowledge of events and situations. In other words, adolescents use existing memories of meaningful relations to ground their memories for novel word pairs, even in an associative learning paradigm.

The organisation and processing of event concepts in semantic memory is an important issue in language processing and memory research. The present study tested whether pairs of words denoting events that can plausibly occur in sequence (marinate-grill) generate expectancies for a target that denotes a subsequently occurring event (chew). In Experiment 1, two events that tend to occur sequentially primed the third. In Experiment 2, the individual primes (i.e., marinate and grill separately) did not prime their related event targets. Experiments 1 and 2 used a lexical-decision task on the target. Therefore, information from both primes must be integrated to sufficiently activate knowledge of the subsequently occurring target. This is the first study to demonstrate priming among words denoting sequentially occurring events. In Experiment 3, a relatedness decision task, processing of these event triplets was facilitated when the first two event words were presented in a temporally correct order compared with when their order was reversed. These findings are not predicted by spreading activation theory and cannot be simulated by corpus-based models that do not include order-sensitive measures. We interpret the results as evidence for the role of situation models and the use of world knowledge during online language comprehension, even in the absence of sentential contexts.