Recent discoveries about associative meaning were hypothesized to have important implications for the problem of assessment of abstraction by clinical tests. The major hypothesis was that association functions in abstraction tests by eliciting both (a) the concept required for the abstraction item, and (b) the associative neighborhood containing the required concept. A series of 4 experiments investigated this hypothesis for both the WAIS Similarities and BRL Object Sorting Tests. In a Sth experiment, an abstraction test (the BRL) was administered as a memory task in order to investigate the role of association in the conceptual organization of recall. All experiments provided strong support for the major hypothesis and have implications for construction of abstraction tests of enhanced clinical sensitivity.