A study on children's lexical networks

Abstract

This project is aimed to investigate children's early language development from a network perspective. The network model has word forms as nodes and links based on collocation relationship. Utterances extracted from the corpus are fed into the model as data input. Two approaches are taken to construct the networks of individual child: accumulative networks and stage networks. Network size and degree are computed, and hub-authority analysis are carried out. Current results show strong heterogeneity among children in terms of network structure and its developing paths.