The psychological reality of LSA is yet unproven, and, as always, more money and research is needed. LSA uses mathematical and statistical techniques to determine the relationship of words in sentences and paragraphs. LSA creates a table mapping the number of occurrences of each distinct word with the set of words in which it occurred. This matrix is then transformed through several steps to determine the importance of each word and its relationships to the other words. An interesting result is that the system can determine relationships to words that do not even exist in the text, but are somehow related.
Children appear to owe their rapid acquisition of vocabulary to similarly indirect processes.
These relationships are not necessarily logical ones, they are primarily indications of similarity. LSA was also in the range of equal to significantly better as a document search engine than existing methods. When trained on introductory psychology textbooks, LSA, though performing below class averages, nonetheless achieved a passing grade based on the usual multiple-choice tests used to grade the class. In many ways, LSA is an interesting model of several aspects of human cognition, performing best in when used to simulate average results over many cases.