%0 Journal Article %1 spence1990lexical %A Spence, Donald P. %A Owens, Kimberly C. %D 1990 %I Springer Netherlands %J Journal of Psycholinguistic Research %K association nlp cooccurrence toread %P 317-330 %T Lexical co-occurrence and association strength %U http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01074363 %V 19 %X The 1-million-word Brown corpus was searched for co-occurrences of semantically related pairs of concrete nouns appearing within an arbitrary window of 250 characters. Related pairs of nouns (OCEAN-WATER) co-occur significantly more often than matched, unrelated pairs (OCEAN-HAND), and this difference remained significant within blocks of text up to 1000 characters in length. Frequency of co-occurrence, corrected for chance, is significantly correlated with association strength. Lexical distance between co-occurring members of a given pair is inversely correlated with association strength. Significantly more co-occurrences were found, per unit text, in the fictional sections of the corpus.