Lists of semantically related words are better recalled on immediate memory tests than otherwise equivalent lists of unrelated words. However, measuring the degree of relatedness is not straightforward. We report three experiments that assess the ability of various measures of semantic relatedness—including latent semantic analysis (LSA), GloVe, fastText, and a number of measures based on WordNet—to predict whether two lists of words will be differentially recalled. In Experiment 1, all measures except LSA correctly predicted the observed better recall of the related than the unrelated list. In Experiment 2, all measures except JCN predicted that abstract words would be recalled equally as well as concrete words because of their enhanced semantic relatedness. In Experiment 3, LSA, GLoVe, and fastText predicted an enhanced concreteness effect because the concrete words were more related; three WordNet measures predicted a small concreteness effect because the abstract and concrete words did not differ in semantic relatedness; and three other WordNet measures predicted no concreteness effect because the abstract words were more related than the concrete words. A small concreteness effect was observed. Over the three experiments, only two measures, both based on simple WordNet path length, predicted all three results. We suggest that the results are not unexpected because semantic processing in episodic memory experiments differs from that in reading, similarity judgment, and analogy tasks which are the most common way of assessing such measures.

在即刻记忆测试中，语义相关的单词列表比不相关单词的等效列表更容易被召回。然而，衡量相关程度并不简单。我们报告了三个实验，这些实验评估了各种语义相关性测量的能力——包括潜在语义分析 ( LSA )、GloVe、fastText和许多基于 WordNet 的测量——以预测两个单词列表是否会被差异召回。在实验 1 中，除了LSA之外的所有测量都正确地预测了观察到的相关列表比无关列表更好的召回。在实验 2 中，除JCN外的所有措施预测抽象词将与具体词一样被召回，因为它们增强了语义相关性。在实验 3 中，LSA、GLoVe和fastText预测增强的具体性效果，因为具体的词更相关；由于抽象词和具体词在语义相关性上没有区别，三个 WordNet 测量预测了一个小的具体性效应；和其他三个 WordNet 测量预测没有具体性效应，因为抽象词比具体词更相关。观察到了小的具体性效应。在三个实验中，只有两个基于简单 WordNet 路径长度的度量预测了所有三个结果。我们认为结果并不出人意料，因为情景记忆实验中的语义处理与阅读、相似性判断和类比任务中的语义处理不同，后者是评估此类测量的最常见方法。