What term refers to the way a word accumulates associations through repeated encounters?

• A. priming
• B. collocation
• C. entrenchment
• D. lexicalization

Answer: (A)

Repeated encounters with a word build a network of associations in your mental lexicon, and the term for that effect is priming. When a word appears in many different contexts, related concepts, senses, and emotional tones get activated alongside it. This makes future processing faster and easier because those connections are already partially activated. For example, reading or hearing a word in varied contexts links it to related ideas like objects, actions, or moods, so you recognize and retrieve it more quickly later on. The other terms describe different ideas: collocation is about habitual co-occurrence with other words, entrenchment is about fixed, conventionalized phrases, and lexicalization is the process of turning a concept into a word.