Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In semantic fluency tasks, speakers name as many category exemplars as possible within a time limit. After age 8 to9 years, bilinguals produce fewer words in semantic fluency tasks than monolinguals (e.g., Friesen et al., 2015). Thiseffect may result from differences in how monolinguals and bilinguals search their semantic networks (e.g., Sandoval etal., 2010), which we examined here. Five- to 11-year-old monolinguals and bilinguals (n=300) completed a semanticfluency task. Monolinguals produced more words with age (r=.27, p=.001), whereas bilinguals did not (r=.11, p=.43).However, with age, bilinguals (r=-.32, p=.016)–but not monolinguals (r=.04, p=.65)–produced lower frequency words.Additionally, Latent Semantic Analysis revealed bilinguals to produce more semantically similar words in sequence withage (bilinguals: r=-.26, p=.05; monolinguals: r=.02, p=.83). These findings suggest bilingual children may develop moreefficient semantic search strategies than monolinguals.