The purpose of these studies was to test a theory of associative context (defined as the association between two words in a pair) on recognition memory. The theory states that culturally associated words in a pair and nonassociated words in a pair differ after a single study trial in terms of their frequency representation in memory. Two experiments were required to show that the use of mixed lists of associated and nonassociated pairs was not the appropriate way to study the effect of associative context on recognition memory. The third experiment provided no support for the theory. Recognition of associated and nonassociated pairs did not differ appreciably. The loss in recognition performance for single words taken from study pairs was the same for associated and for nonassociated pairs. Frequency judgments paralleled the results for recognition decisions in most aspects of the data. It was concluded that associative context, specified in terms of the strength of the association between two words in a pair, is not a critical factor in recognition performance. (Author)