We examined our proposal using a recently published dataset of production norms (Jouravlev and McRae, 2016) and confirmed when people were explicitly asked to recall thematically related words, their responses were more likely located within the context embedding space in the vicinity of the cues word embedding.
facilitation is seen for word pairs that are purely category coordinates (lawyersurgeon) or purely associates (scalpel-surgeon), and pairs that share both types of relations (nursesurgeon) tend to see an additive processing benefit that reflects the privilege of both similarity and relatedness, an effect generally referred to as the "associative boost" (Chiarello et al., 1990;Lucas, 2000).