Relationship between Two Measures of Verbal Relatedness: Preliminary Report

Abstract

Two measures of associative overlap between word pairs, the Mutual Relatedness Index (MR) and the Relatedness Coefficient (RC), computed from group single response free word associations and continued word associations from individual Ss, respectively, were computed from norms obtained from the same Ss for two samples of word pairs. The correlation between MR and RC for the two samples, was .540 and .504. With correction for attenuation, the correlation between MR and RC is .76. MR was highly correlated with direct association (r = .88) while RC was not (r = .43). It is tenable that MR and RC do not reflect the same aspects of verbal relatedness even though they are both considered measures of the associative overlap between a pair of words.