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.

关于双语和单词关系的分布特性对儿童语义收敛发展的影响知之甚少，语义收敛是儿童产生单词联想的能力，反映了成年人在单词联想任务中的反应。45 名普通话-英语双语儿童、32 名西班牙语-英语双语儿童和 28 名英语单语儿童，年龄在 4 至 7 岁之间，对 15 个英语单字提示中的每一个产生了三个联想。将儿童的作品与成人对“语言小世界”规范中相同提示的反应进行比较。比较儿童反应与成人反应相似性的三种评分方法表明，双语在产生类似成人的反应方面存在一致的劣势。后续分析针对成人对每个提示产生的三种最主要的反应，并解决了预测儿童产生这些反应的可能性的因素。结果显示了通过共现和语义相关性衡量的线索联想关系的额外影响。研究结果突出了词关系和语义收敛的知识发展的多面性。