The study was designed to compare Underwood and Schulz's associative probability hypothesis and the paired frequency of two words in performance on a paired-associate task. After being presented a list, 16 Ss matched responses with their stimuli. Each list contained a word pair or item, of (a) high frequency of occurrence, (b) low frequency, (c) zero frequency plus a mediator, and (d) zero frequency (the control pair). While the high-frequency items were learned more rapidly than the low-frequency items, the mediator did not affect the zero-frequency items which were learned at a similar rate to that for the control. This result was interpreted as showing the superiority of paired frequency in associative learning.
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