Children's likelihood to perform adult-like in word association test: Effects of bilingualism and distributional properties of word relationships

Abstract Little is known about the effects of bilingualism and distributional properties word relationships on children's development semantic convergence, operationalized as ability to produce associates that mirror adults’ responses in a association task. Forty-five Mandarin–English bilingual, 32 Spanish–English 28 English-speaking monolingual children, aged 4 7, produced three each 15 single-word cues English. Children's productions were compared against adult same “Small World Words” Norm. Three scoring methods comparing similarities showed consistent bilingual disadvantages producing adult-like responses. Follow-up analyses targeted most predominant adults for cue addressed factors predicting likelihood these Results additional cue-associate measured by co-occurrence relatedness. The findings highlight multi-faceted nature knowledge relationship convergence.