Empirical research on the effects of semantic relatedness on EFL new vocabulary presentation has far y ielded inconsistent results. Thus, this study aims to examine to what extent semantic relatedness influences EFL vocabulaIy recall and retention for primary school students in Korea. The current study was conducted with 107 primary school students over 4 weeks. To compare the effects of presenting semantically related words (SR) and unrelated words (SU), participants were di vided into two groups, the semantically related words group (Group R) and the unrelated group (Group U). All the participants learned the same 40 English words paired with their Korean translation through one of two di ffe rent methods. The results revealed that both presentation methods have positive effects on EFL vocabu lary reca ll and retenti on. Between these two methods, SU was found to y ield better results on recall and retention. This difference between groups could be explained from the perspective of interference theory, the distinctive hypothesis, or cross-association. Lastly, significant perceptual change concerning the effecti veness of related words presentation was found in Group R.