Bilingualism: Language and Cognition cambridge.org/bil Children’s likelihood to perform adult-like in word association test: Effects of bilingualism and distributional properties of word relationships Research Article Boji P. W. Lam1 Cite this article: Lam BPW, Sheng L, Zhang X (2022). Children’s likelihood to perform adultlike in word association test: Effects of bilingualism and distributional properties of word relationships. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S1366728922000463 1 Received: 5 July 2021 Revised: 15 June 2022 Accepted: 19 June 2022 Keywords: Semantic convergence; word association; Spanish–English bilingual children; ChineseEnglish bilingual children; the “Small World of Words” Address for correspondence: Boji P. W. Lam Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, The University of North Texas 907 W Sycamore St, Denton, TX 76201 pakwingjacky.lam@unt.edu , Li Sheng2 and Xian Zhang3 Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, The University of North Texas, Denton, TX USA; Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience & Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China and 3Department of Linguistics, The University of North Texas, Denton, TX USA 2 Abstract Little is known about the effects of bilingualism and distributional properties of word relationships on children’s development of semantic convergence, operationalized as children’s ability to produce word associates that mirror adults’ responses in a word association task. Forty-five Mandarin–English bilingual, 32 Spanish–English bilingual, and 28 English-speaking monolingual children, aged 4 to 7, produced three associates to each of 15 single-word cues in English. Children’s productions were compared against adult responses to the same cues in the “Small World of Words” Norm. Three scoring methods comparing similarities of children’s responses to adults’ showed consistent bilingual disadvantages in producing adult-like responses. Follow-up analyses targeted the three most predominant responses adults produced for each cue and addressed factors predicting children’s likelihood to produce these responses. Results showed additional effects of cue-associate relationships measured by co-occurrence and semantic relatedness. The findings highlight the multi-faceted nature of knowledge development of word relationship and semantic convergence. Introduction © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press Free word association task (WAT) is commonly used to assess word knowledge and lexicalsemantic organization among children (e.g., Entwisle, 1966; Nelson, 1977; for a review, see Wojcik, 2018) and adults (De Deyne, Navarro, Perfors, Brysbaert & Storms, 2019; Nelson, McEvoy & Schreiber, 2004). In a typical WAT, participants hear or read a lexical cue (e.g., CAT) and report the first word that comes to mind (e.g., DOG). Words are theorized to be stored as nodes in the mental lexicon that are interconnected as a network, within which activation of a node spreads to connected nodes automatically during lexical tasks or daily encounters (Anderson, 1983; Collins & Loftus, 1975; Steyvers & Tenenbaum, 2005). During a WAT, the exposure to a cue activates connected neighbors that compete for production, and neighbors that exhibit stronger connectivity and faster activation would be more likely to be reported as the first word that comes to mind (Playfoot, Balint, Pandya, Parkes, Peters & Richards., 2018). Participants take longer to produce associates that do not exhibit the strongest link to the cue in a WAT (Playfoot et al., 2018), which suggests elevated challenges to suppress and NOT report the first word that comes to mind upon hearing the cue. WAT performance thus indicates abilities in learning the lexical form of a word, its conceptual referent, and, importantly, the relationships among words. Significant discrepancies between children’s and adults’ responses to WAT are expected (e.g., Entwisle, 1966; Nelson, 1977) due to differences in conceptual organization and accumulated language experience. An examination of WAT performance would shed light on semantic convergence, a socially mediated process in which children learn to use words and their connotations in a way that mimics the use of adults from the same language community (Adams & Bullock, 1986). Previous work has demonstrated the significant influence of age on WAT performance (e.g., Cremer, Dingshoff, de Beer & Schoonen, 2011; Nelson, 1977; Spätgens & Schoonen, 2020). Entwisle (1966) showed that older monolingual children (e.g., fifth grade) produced more responses commonly shared among group members than younger monolingual children (e.g., preschoolers), suggesting greater within-group homogeneity that characterizes the community. The effect of age on semantic convergence may reflect developmental changes in organizational principles of the mental lexicon (McNeill, 1963; Nelson, 1977; Nelson & Nelson, 1990; Palermo, 1971; Smiley & Brown, 1979; Waxman & Namy, 1997). It has been shown that children between 6 and 9 produce more paradigmatic associations that belong to the same grammatical or taxonomic category (e.g., DOG–CAT) than younger children, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728922000463 Published online by Cambridge University Press