Semantic Organization Development of Chinese Preschool Children from a Dynamic Semantic Network Perspective

Network models are one of the methods used by linguists, psychologists and cognitive scientists to represent the semantic organization structure. In order to understand the semantic organization development of Chinese preschool children in their actual use of language, this paper constructs dynamic semantic networks with content words connected based on dependency grammar. The semantic dependency networks are studied and results are found as follows: (1) The semantic networks of children aged 3 to 6 are of small-world and scale-free like other mature language networks, indicating children’s highly efficient systems for the semantic organization. (2) Other network properties such as the number of nodes, average path length and clustering coefficient show the increasing lexical resources, stronger ability in the processing of semantic structures, and less focus on the local structures with the increase of age, particularly among the age from 3 to 5. (3) The number of subnetworks decreases as children grow from 3 to 5, while the densest subnetwork expands dramatically with a semantic organization tendency from scattered to clustered and condensed at this period. (4) The variation of the high-degree word nodes with age groups suggests the development of lexical-semantic skills in the semantic organization. Clear differences are embodied in the use of verbs, nouns and pronouns, which is closely related to children’s word acquisition and psychological and cognitive development