Cross-linguistically Small World Networks are Ubiquitous in Child-directed Speech

Abstract

In this paper we use network theory to model graphs of child-directed speech from caregivers of children from nine typologically and morphologically diverse languages. With the resulting lexical adjacency graphs, we calculate the network statistics {N, E, <k>, L, C} and compare them against the standard baseline of the same parameters from randomly generated networks of the same size. We show that typologically and morphologically diverse languages all share small world properties in their child-directed speech. Our results add to the repertoire of universal distributional patterns found in the input to children cross-linguistically. We discuss briefly some implications for language acquisition research.

Resources

Details