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 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.

Analyzing 2nd Grade Life Studies Objectives for Root Values and Identifying 2nd Graders' Perceptions of Root Values

“…The literature shows that word association tests are utilized for revealing students' cognitive portraits (Bahar et al, 1999;Cardellini and Bahar, 2000), identifying misconceptions (Ercan, Taşdere, and Ercan, 2010) and depicting their conceptual changes (Nakiboğlu, 2008) in a wide range of areas. In the literature, such tests have been employed in the context of sciences (Balbağ, 2018;Nergiz, 2022;Özyurt and Yalman, 2020;Roncevic, 2023;Sarıoğlan and Deveci, 2021;Sikumbang, Rakhmawati, and Suwandi, 2019;Timur et al, 2020) and social studies (Çelik, 2020;Gençoğlu, 2019;İlker & Aktaşlı, 2022;Lam, Sheng, & Zhang, 2023;Şentürk & Keskin, 2023;Yılmaz, 2019). There are also studies using word association tests in Life Studies courses (Ekici & Bilici, 2017;Gündoğan & Gültekin, 2018;Tezcan, 2019).…”