Relation between Single Word Association and Continued Association Response Hierarchies

Abstract

Association data for 20 words were obtained through two methods, single word association and continued association. Response frequencies in single word association were correlated with response frequencies in continued association and with a measure of association strength in continued association which took into account frequency and average order of emission of response words. The latter correlations ranged from .52 to .94 and were in each case higher than the corresponding frequency-frequency correlations. It was concluded that continued association and single word association produce similar response hierarchies and that order of emission is related to association strength in continued association. It was suggested that the order of emission-frequency measure developed in this paper may be an economical and perhaps useful measure of association strength.