Predicting Word Maturity from Frequency and Semantic Diversity: A Computational Study

Abstract

Semantic word representation changes over different ages of childhood until it reaches its adult form. One method to formally model this change is the word maturity paradigm. This method uses a text sample for each age, including adult age, and transforms the samples into a semantic space by means of Latent Semantic Analysis. The representation of a word at every age is then compared with its adult representation via computational maturity indices. The present study used this paradigm to explore to the impact of word frequency and semantic diversity on maturation indices. To do this, word maturity indices were extracted from a Spanish incremental corpus and validated, using correlation scores with Age of Acquisition and Word Difficulty indices from previous studies. The results show that both frequency and semantic diversity predict word maturity but that the predictive capacity of frequency decreases as exposure to language increases. The latter result is discussed in terms of inductive processes suggested in previous studies.

Acknowledgments

We thank members of Semantia Lab (http://www.semantialab.es) for freely providing the software Gallito Studio and gallitoAPI for this research and Molino de Ideas for allowing us to use the API to automatically retrieve the Instituto Cervantes difficulty index for each word (https://store.apicultur.com/).

Notes

¹ The ages on the x axis used for the adjustments were 0, 9, 12, 16, and 21. It was assumed that adult age would be represented by the value 21 to have an additional point in the adjustments. Even though this is an arbitrary value, the technique used and the kind of function used (logistic functions) make it possible to minimize the impact of the specific value. Changing the value 21 to 25 or 30 would minimally change the adjusted functions, and thus the TTM values determined by them. In addition, the sample corpus for adult age contains novels, newspapers, and technical texts that correspond to an age of approximately 21.