In psychology, I believe one common procedure is where a subject is
shown something (in this question, a noun), and then generates
something (a verb).

I would like a (free) set of noun-verb pairs, where the noun strongly
primes the verb, as large as feasible.

I think this procedure is called "a verb generation task" by psychologists.

I think that psychologists do build and maintain these lists;
searching for "free association norms" I found
http://w3.usf.edu/FreeAssociation/, which is close, but not what I
want.