Propositional accounts of organization in memory have dominated theory in compositional semantics, but it is an openquestion whether their adoption has been necessitated by the data. We present data from a narrative comprehensionexperiment, designed to distinguish between a propositional account of semantic representation and an associative accountbased on the Syntagmatic-Paradigmatic (Dennis, 2005; SP) model. We manipulated expected propositional-interferenceby including distractor sentences that shared a verb with a target sentence. We manipulated paradigmatic-interferenceby including two distractor sentences, one of which contained a name from a target sentence. That is, we increased thesecond-order co-occurrence between a name in a target sentence and a distractor. Contrary to the propositional assumption,our results show that subjects are sensitive to second-order co-occurrence, hence favouring the associative account