Analysing Language Development from a Network Approach*

Abstract

In this paper we propose some new measures of language development using network analyses, which is inspired by the recent surge of interests in network studies of many real-world systems. Children's and care-takers' speech data from a longitudinal study are represented as a series of networks, word forms being taken as nodes and collocation of words as links. Measures on the properties of the networks, such as size, connectivity, hub and authority analyses, etc., allow us to make quantitative comparison so as to reveal different paths of development. For example, the asynchrony of development in network size and average degree suggests that children cannot be simply classified as early talkers or late talkers by one or two measures. Children follow different paths in a multi-dimensional space. They may develop faster in one dimension but slower in another dimension. The network approach requires little preprocessing of words and analyses on sentence structures, and the characteristics of words and their usage emerge from the network and are independent of any grammatical presumptions. We show that the change of the two articles "the" and "a" in their roles as important nodes in the network reflects the progress of children's syntactic development: the two articles often start in children's networks as hubs and later shift to authorities, while they are authorities constantly in the adult's networks. The network analyses provide a new approach to study language development, and at the same time language development also presents a rich area for network theories to explore. children use certain constructions often as formulaic expressions, instead of knowing the constructions are decomposable as adults do (Peters, 1977;Wray, 2002).In this paper, we propose a novel approach to analyze the language development from a network perspective. We take the children's longitudinal speech data to construct lexical networks at different stages, and compare these networks with several measures. Also, we compare networks between different children, and networks between children and their caretakers. Through the comparison, children's development and individual differences can be demonstrated quantitatively by measures with little language-specific assumptions.

Syntactic Complex Networks and Their Applications

“…What is more surprising is a relatively rare application of the network analysis in this branch of science; one could expect that a successful application of this methodology to modeling other dynamic systems should trigger its usage in this research area as well. Moreover, existing results are promising (Ninio 2006;Ke and Yao 2008;Corominas-Murtra et al 2009;Corominas-Murtra et al 2010;Hills et al 2009). According to us, both an unfamiliarity of scientists focused on the language acquisition with the network theory and a relative technical difficulty (especially in the case of syntactic networks) are the main reasons of this state.…”

Analyzing and modeling real-world phenomena with complex networks: a survey of applications

“…Nevertheless, the model fails to reproduce the frequency of three-word motifs and the evolution of hub connectivity. An earlier study of language development appeared in [507], albeit using word co-occurrence networks.…”

Function Nodes in Chinese Syntactic Networks

“…So far, much research has been carried out, mainly concerned with the structure of syntactic dependency networks (Ferrer i Cancho 2005;Liu 2008;Chen and Liu 2011;Čech et al 2011), the patterns in syntactic dependency networks (Ferrer i Cancho et al 2004;, language development or language evolution (Ke and Yao 2008;Mukherjee et al 2013;Mehler et al 2011), language clustering and linguistic categorization (Liu 2010;Liu and Cong 2013;Gong et al 2012;Abramov and Mehler 2011), manual and machine translation (Amancio et al 2008;Amancio et al 2011), word sense disambiguation (Christiano and Raphael 2013), communication and interaction (Banisch et al 2010;Mehler et al 2010), the structure of semantic networks (Borge-Holthoefer and Arenas 2010; Liu 2009), phonetics (Arbesman et al 2010;Yu et al 2011), morphology (Čech andMačutek 2009;Liu and Xu 2011), parts of speech (Ferrer i Cancho et al 2007), Knowledge Networks (Allee 2007), cognitive networks (Mehler et al 2012).…”