Network Growth Modeling to Capture Individual Lexical Learning

Network models of language provide a systematic way of linking cognitive processes to the structure and connectivity of language. Using network growth models to capture learning, we focus on the study of the emergence of complexity in early language learners. Specifically, we capture the emergent structure of young toddler’s vocabularies through network growth models assuming underlying knowledge representations of semantic and phonological networks. In construction and analyses of these network growth models, we explore whether phonological or semantic relationships between words play a larger role in predicting network growth as these young learners add new words to their lexicon. We also examine how the importance of these semantic and phonological representations changes during the course of development. We propose a novel and significant theoretical framework for network growth models of acquisition and test the ability of these models to predict what words a specific child is likely to learn approximately one month in the future. We find that which acquisition model best fits is influenced by the underlying network representation, the assumed process of growth, and the network centrality measure used to relate the cognitive underpinnings of acquisition to network growth. The joint importance of representation, process, and the contribution of individual words to the predictive accuracy of the network model highlights the complex and multifaceted nature of early acquisition, provides new tools, and suggests experimental hypotheses for studying lexical acquisition.