What is free association and what does it measure?

This paper reports the results of a study of free association in which part icipants were asked to produce the first two words to come to mind. The fin dings were used to estimate the reliability of indices of strength and set size for different types of items and to model free association as a retrie val task. When confined to first responses, reliability was generally high for both indices, particularly for words with smaller sets of associates an d stronger primaries. When second responses were included, reliability decl ined. A second response added new but weak items to the set, and, when the primary associate was not produced on the first opportunity, it bended not to be produced on the second. Relative to when multiple responses are reque sted, first-response free association provides more reliable indices of the relative strength and set size for a word's strongest associates. A model of free association assuming that a strength distribution underlies each re sponse provided a good fit to the data.