Corpus-based estimates of word association predict biases in judgment of word co-occurrence likelihood

• Word association in linguistics and confirmation in epistemology are related notions.
• The same factors underlie both inductive reasoning and linguistic knowledge.
• Confirmation values affect intuitions about likelihood of word co-occurrence.
• The effect is stable across three different experimental settings.

This paper draws a connection between statistical word association measures used in linguistics and confirmation measures from epistemology. Having theoretically established the connection, we replicate, in the new context of the judgments of word co-occurrence, an intriguing finding from the psychology of reasoning, namely that confirmation values affect intuitions about likelihood. We show that the effect, despite being based in this case on very subtle statistical insights about thousands of words, is stable across three different experimental settings. Our theoretical and empirical results suggest that factors affecting traditional reasoning tasks are also at play when linguistic knowledge is probed, and they provide further evidence for the importance of confirmation in a new domain.