How words are associated within the linguistic environment conveys semantic content, and it is well known that adultsspeak differently to children than to other adults. We present results from a new word association study in which adultparticipants are instructed to produce either unconstrained or child-directed responses to each cue, where cues included674 nouns, verbs, and adjectives from the McArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI). Child-directedresponses consisted of higher frequency words with fewer letters and earlier ages of acquisition. The correlations amongthe responses generated for each pair of cues differed between unconstrained and child-directed responses, suggestingthat child-directed associations imply different semantic structure. A comparison of growth models guided by semanticnetwork structure revealed that child-directed associations are more predictive of early lexical growth. Thus, these newchild-directed word association norms may provide more clear insight into the semantic context of young children.