The main purpose of the study was to separate word association from semantic meaning to determine if association makes a separate contribution to false memory in the Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) memory paradigm. Participants were placed in a pleasantness condition (N = 46), where they were focused on processing the meaning of words and an orthographic condition (N = 46). Subjects participated in a DRM memory task that involved listening to lists of words and trying to recall them after study periods. Activation/monitoring theory has associative predictions of the DRM false memory illusion which emphasize that backwards associative strength values of the targets that subjects recall will be strongly related to whether subjects produce the unpresented critical distractor. Relations between inter-word associative strength (associative firing) and false recall were analyzed and the results illustrated that none of the associative theory's predictions are an outcome in the DRM illusion. Strong levels of false memory were found. The pleasantness condition had significantly larger amounts of true memory compared to the orthographic condition. There was a main effect for the memory factor such that targets were recalled more than critical distractors, and critical distractors were recalled more than other distractors. There was no evidence of a separate associative contribution to false recall.