Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual‐usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text (Landauer it mimics human word sorting and category judgments; it simulates word‐word and passage‐word lexical priming data; and, as reported in 3 following articles in this issue, it accurately estimates passage coherence, learnability of passages by individual students, and the quality and quantity of knowledge contained in an essay.
Landauer et al. (1998) studied this question.