A simple way would be to loop over the first array two at a time, building the associative structure as you go.
$array = array("greeting", "hello", "question", "how-are-you", "response", "im-fine");
$assoc = array();
foreach (array_chunk($array, 2) as $pair) {
list($key, $value) = $pair;
$assoc[$key] = $value;
}
var_export($assoc);
/*
array (
'greeting' => 'hello',
'question' => 'how-are-you',
'response' => 'im-fine',
)
*/
There are likely ways of doing this in one line of code but the above should be nice and clear in what it is doing. (: