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.

@article{spence1990lexical, author = {Spence, Donald P. and Owens, Kimberly C.}, title = {Lexical co-occurrence and association strength}, journal = {Journal of Psycholinguistic Research }, publisher = {Springer Netherlands}, year = {1990}, volume = {19}, pages = {317-330}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01074363}, doi = {10.1007/BF01074363}, issn = {0090-6905}, keywords = {association, nlp, cooccurrence, toread}, abstract = {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.} }

%0 = article %A = Spence, Donald P. and Owens, Kimberly C. %D = 1990 %I = Springer Netherlands %T = Lexical co-occurrence and association strength %U = http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01074363