Word characteristics, associative-relatedness, and the free-recall of nouns

Abstract

In Exp. I, relationships between word imagery, concreteness, Noble's meaningfulness (m), rated meaningfulness, rated familiarity, Thorndike-Lorge frequency, trigram frequency, word goodness, evaluative polarity and word length, as well as their relations with free-recall learnability, were investigated. Measures of the word characteristics and an ease of free-recall score (FR) were obtained for 74 nouns. Factor analysis revealed two common factors, meaningful-familiarity and imagery-concreteness, underlying the relationships observed. Only imagery-concreteness was related to FR. In Exp. II it was found that words high in imagery-concreteness are more readily organized or clustered into groups than abstract, low imagery words. Imagery remained significantly related to FR when ease of clustering was held constant. It was suggested that another process, perhaps attention, may also be involved in the determination of FR. When corrected for attenuation due to the less than perfect reliability of FR, a multiple R = .82 was obtained between FR and imagery, associative relatedness, and rated meaningfulness.