Analyzing language development from a network approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a network analysis approach to studying language development, using children's speech data to quantify and compare developmental paths without relying on grammatical assumptions.

Contribution

It proposes new network-based measures for language development, revealing multi-dimensional developmental trajectories and syntactic progress through network role shifts of words.

Findings

Children develop at different rates across multiple network measures.

The roles of articles 'the' and 'a' shift from hubs to authorities as children develop.

Network properties can reflect syntactic development stages.

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.