Analysing Language Development from a Network Approach*

Abstract

Children acquire their language in different ways. In this paper we propose some new measures from a network approach in quantifying these individual differences. Children's and care-takers' speech data are represented as a series of networks, word forms being taken as nodes and collocation of words as links. First, we compare two independent indices on network growth, including the size and the connectivity. Children with a small vocabulary (i.e. a small network size) may have more flexibility in word combination (i.e. a large connectivity), and vice versa. Second, we examine the changes of hub and authority nodes in the networks. The change in the roles of the two articles “the” and “a” reflects the progress of syntactic development. While they constantly appear as authorities in adults' networks, the two articles often start in children's networks as hubs and shift to authorities later. Children shift by different routes and at different rates.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Professors William W-Y Wang, Thomas H-T Lee, Ron G-R Chen, and the members in the former Language Engineering Laboratory at City University of Hong Kong, and the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage in Lyon, France for their support and advice for this study. Also, we thank Professors Nick Ellis, Ricard Solé and Dr. Christophe Coupé for their valuable comments on the paper. This paper is based on the final year project done by Yao Yao at City University of Hong Kong, and some parts of this work were presented in the 12th Annual Conference of International Association of Chinese Linguistics, Tianjin, China, 2004.