Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated object naming in Dutch-French bilingual children to determine the developmental trajectory of thecross-language convergence in naming patterns shown by bilingual adults. We collected name choices for nearly 200 commonhousehold containers from French-Dutch simultaneous bilinguals of 6 different age groups, along with monolingual controlgroups. Multidimensional scaling analysis on a group level suggests that convergence is present in bilinguals at all ages. Onthe individual level, pairwise between-subject correlations show that monolingual naming patterns in different languages showa remarkable correspondence at younger ages. Between age 5 and adulthood, the naming patterns of monolingual childrendemonstrate increasing divergence as they learn the language specificities of their L1. Bilingual children, however, maintain afully converged naming pattern up till age 10. They start learning some language-specific idiosyncrasies from age 12 onwards,but never to the extent of monolinguals. We propose a gradual divergence perspective for bilingual lexical development.