Abstract
In the past five years or so, the topic of semantic memory has become a very active area of experimental research. This paper presents a relatively different approach in trying to understand subjects' performance in semantic memory tasks. Several of the major theoretical analyses in this field are discussed first. We raise some interpretive problems with earlier studies, and with these considerations in mind, offer our own method for investigating the semantic memory paradigm and analyzing its data. The study of Collins and Quillian (1969) was instrumental in stirring interest in semantic memory. They proposed that our categorical knowledge was stored in a strict hierarchical fashion. They claimed, for instance, that we have directly stored Collies are dogs and Dogs are mammals but not Collies are mammals. To verify this last fact, a subject would have to retrieve the first two and with these infer the truth of the third. This proposal has been called the cognitive economy hypothesis because it reduces memory requirements to a logical minimum. The
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