Associative asymmetry, availability, and retrieval.

Associative frequency, the ease with which a word comes to mind in free association, is taken as a measure of general response availability. As expected from this view, in both controlled experiments and in reanalyses of previously published correlational data, high associative frequency words were judged to be more familiar and were easier to recall but harder to recognize than low associative frequency words, even with meaningfulnees, imagery, length in letters, and frequency excluded as factors. When used as follll in a recognition experiment, high associative frequency words attracted more responaes than low aaeocietive frequency words. In addition, associative frequency and meaningfulness correlated only moderately and had different patterns of correlations with other variables, suggesting that the number of associationsleading to and from a word differ.