The Association Value of Thirty Meaningful Words

Forty-one men and women undergraduates individually wrote down the verbal associations arising in relation to each of 30 three-letter meaningful words, with a time allowance of 1 min. per word. The association value of each word was defined as the mean number of acceptable words written in response to it. Two sets of words were then chosen from the list for subsequent use as response terms in a verbal-motor transfer experiment. One set, formally similar, was found to have a mean association value of 8.752. The other set, formally distinct, had a satisfactorily comparable mean association value of 8.792