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Research that investigates the speech production of children with cochlear implants (CIs) mostly focuses on the characteristics of their speech sounds. Few studies have looked at the psycholinguistic processes during speech production of children with CI. Our study examines the semantic processing during speech production of this group of speakers, compared to their normal hearing (NH) peers. Using the picture-word interference paradigm, we manipulated the semantic relatedness between target picture names and distractor words. We observed the typical semantic interference effect in the NH group but not in the CI group, suggesting that the semantic network may be organized differently in the CI group than in their NH peers and the CI group may have difficulties accessing the semantic categories. Furthermore, our results are in line with the suggestion that the CI group may rely more on a top-down strategy or attentional cognitive processing than a bottom-up semantic activation.