A procedure for investigating how word meanings are stored in memory.

In a word association test, the researcher presents a series of words to individual respondents. For each word, participants are instructed to respond with the first word (i.e., associate) that comes to mind. Freud believed that such responses provided clues to peoples' personalities (free association). Cognitive psychologists, however, use this procedure to investigate how semantic information is stored in memory. Studies have demonstrated that word associations are almost always based on a word's meaning, as opposed to its physical properties. For example, a typical response to the word KNIFE might be FORK or perhaps SPOON, but not WIFE or LIFE. Over the years, psychologists have...