The present study focuses on the effect of an important methodological choice in word association studies in children: the elicitation of single versus multiple responses. This choice has been shown to affect the numbers and types of associations adults produce, however, little is known about how it affects children’s word associations. A total of 11,725 associations to 80 nouns from 207 monolingual and bilingual minority children were classified according to a detailed coding system, and differences between the semantic characteristics of first, second, and third responses were examined. We show that in children as well, the multiple association task elicits more and qualitatively different responses, resulting in more diversified semantic networks surrounding the stimulus nouns. On the speaker level, reading comprehension scores were related differently to initial and later responses, suggesting a more complex measure of semantic knowledge emerges from the multiple word association task. No differences were found between monolingual and bilingual children’s associative preferences. We argue that the multiple association task produces more detailed data on language users’ semantic networks than the single association task, and suggest a number of ways in which this task could be employed in future research.

Using a semantic priming experiment, the influence of lexical access and knowledge of semantic relations on reading comprehension was studied in Dutch monolingual and bilingual minority children. Both context-independent semantic relations in the form of category coordinates and context-dependent semantic relations involving concepts that co-occur in certain contexts were tested in an auditory animacy decision task, along with lexical access. Reading comprehension and the control variables vocabulary size, decoding skill, and mental processing speed were tested by means of standardized tasks. Mixed-effects modeling was used to obtain individual priming scores and to study the effect of individual differences in the various predictor variables on the reading scores. Semantic priming was observed for the coordinate pairs but not the context-dependently related pairs, and neither context-independent priming nor lexical access predicted reading comprehension. Only vocabulary size significantly contributed to the reading scores, emphasizing the importance of the number of words known for reading comprehension. Finally, the results show that the monolingual and bilingual children perform similarly on all measures, suggesting that in the current Dutch context, language status may not be highly predictive of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension skill.