In order to move the investigation of word association toward both gender-related and also part of speech differences, data were obtained from two cohorts of Persian adults. 20 male and 20 female adults responded to 40 words in a discrete word association test. The degree of overlap between the cohorts in terms of dominant responses, the responses with the highest frequency, was moderate. When the top three responses were considered, the degree of overlap increased to 60%. Analysing data in terms of the frequency of each type of association indicates that “meaning-based associations” were the most popular. The proportion of each association type considering abstraction level of stimulus word emerged that although the meaning-based associations were the most frequent type in all levels yet the highest the level of abstraction, the less number of meaning-based associations will be.

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