For a measure preserving transformation T of a probability space (X, F , µ) and some d ≥ 1 we investigate almost sure and distributional convergence of random variables of the formwhere C 1 , C 2 , . . . are normalizing constants and the kernel f belongs to an appropriate subspace in some L p (X d , F ⊗d , µ d ). We establish a form of the individual ergodic theorem for such sequences.Using a filtration compatible with T and the martingale approximation, we prove a central limit theorem in the non-degenerate case; for a class of canonical (totally degenerate) kernels and d = 2, we also show that the convergence holds in distribution towards a quadratic form ∞ m=1 λ m η 2 m in independent standard Gaussian variables η 1 , η 2