Two types of word association

Anna Gudmundson in his article The mental lexicon of multilingual adult learners of Italian L3: A study of word association behavior and cross-lingual semantic priming summarizes word association categories of other researchers (Fitzpatrick & Izura). The first two categories are

1. Equivalent meaning relation
 * synonymy (rug-carpet);
 * co-ordination (bus-car);
 * superordination (bird-robin);
 * subordination (bird-animal);
 * partonymy (bird-feather)
2. Non-equivalent meaning relation
 * scream-afraid; steak-argentina; bubble-child

and he said "Equivalent meaning relations represent a close semantic relation and could be
said to operate on a paradigmatic level: both words belong to the same word class,
appear in the same semantic and grammatical contexts and have similar referents, while the non-equivalent meaning relations and the collocational meaning relations represent a looser semantic connection and a more syntagmatic-based relation" (see pp.78-9), and "there was an increase with age as regards the proportion of paradigmatic associations, and a decrease of the proportion of syntagmatic and form associations" (p.76).

I hope the examples he gave are clear in distinguishing the two types of association. Basically, if you see the word scream and immediately think of cry, shout, you're using equivalent meaning relation, because these words are near synonyms or have some semantic relations with scream. If instead you think of afraid, danger, panic, that's non-equivalent meaning relation.

My books ( Learning Spanish Words and Learning French Words ) mostly use equivalent meaning relation (or paradigmatic association), rarely non-equivalent meaning relation (or syntagmatic association). And so according to his summary of the research, the preferred readers of my book are adults and not young children, which is what I stated repeatedly in the introductions of the books. Now I come to think of it. Maybe I should occasionally add some non-equivalent meaning relation as mnemonics, especially when a good mnemonic is hard to come by (and etymology does not help). Actually, there are some in the books, but just too few.

Incidentally, older language learners not only change their word association type (from non-equivalent meaning relation to equivalent meaning relation), but also tend to rely more on cognates. According to Cognate recognition by young multilingual language learners: the role of age and exposure , "age was the strongest determinant of cognate word recognition". This is again consistent with my claim that my books are more suitable for older learners.