An analysis of semantic stimulus factors in paired-associate learning

Previous research has found the major stimulus characteristics related to difficulty of paired-associate learning to be meaningfulness, familiarity, and intralist similarity. In general, meaningfulness and familiarity have been shown to be inversely related to difficulty, while similarity is directly related. The present study employed a correlational design in order to examine the relationships between meaningfulness, familiarity, similarity, and several other semantic characteristics of stimuli, as well as their relation to difficulty. Thirty-two lists, consisting of six words each, were constructed from a basic pool of 32 common nouns. Measures of the difficulty, meaningfulness, and similarity of the lists were obtained experimentally, and published semantic-differential ratings were used to scale the lists on the remaining variables. The correlational analysis showed difficulty to be related to intralist stimulus similarity, but not to stimulus meaningfuness or familiarity. A factor analysis of the correlation matrix showed that both connotative and associative similarity are major factors in simple judged similarity, but that only associative similarity affects difficulty. Meaningfulness, to the extent that it is defined as intensity of meaning, had a negative relationship with difficulty. Familiarity, however, was not correlated with either difficulty or meaningfulness. Meaningfulness and similarity were found to be positively related.