Semantic and associative relations in adolescents and young adults: Examining a tenuous dichotomy.

Abstract

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.

Examining assortativity in the mental lexicon: Evidence from word associations

“…on several occasions that by virtue of not being propositional, word associations capture different information than what can be inferred from a linguistic environment that conveys communicative constraints, such as pragmatics (McRae, Khalkhali, & Hare, 2012;Szalay & Deese, 1978;De Deyne, Verheyen, & Storms, 2014). Assortativity effects have implications for studies in other domains, such as in research on priming.…”

Better explanations of lexical and semantic cognition using networks derived from continued rather than single-word associations

“…Similarly, we expect that in semantic studies, such as priming, not only do word associations inform the forward association strength, but also, given a rich enough network, backward strength is informative. Moreover, as more mediated connections between two concepts are considered, it might turn out that previous distinctions between associative and semantic priming represent a continuum (cf., McRae, Khalkhali, & Hare, 2012). The networks that include secondary and tertiary responses should provide both better estimates of forward and backward strength effects in associative priming, while the distributional overlap measure of relatedness between two words has the potential to account for previously reported findings of semantic priming, especially when incorporating secondary and tertiary responses.…”

Thematic relatedness production norms for 100 object concepts

“…The proposed classification is not exhaustive and does not include all possible types of thematic relations identified in prior research (Borghi & Caramelli, 2003;Estes, Golonka, & Jones, 2011). Furthermore, currently there is not general agreement about a comprehensive typology of thematic relations (for a discussion, see McRae, Khalkhali, & Hare, 2012). It is not clear right now how many types of thematic relations there are, what these relations are, and whether there are processing differences among them.…”