A Study Of The Semantic Organization Development Of Children Aged 3 To 6 Based On Semantic Dependency Analysis

The development of children’s semantic organization is closely related to their development of conceptual cognition,which is a hot topic in the field of children’s language acquisition.Current research mainly focuses on semantic organization patterns and influencing factors for the conceptual storage of children.Little attention,however,has been paid to the semantic organization patterns of children based on the authentic data in real language use.This paper studies the narrative texts of Chinese children aged 3 to 6 with a semantic dependency analysis to find out the general rules and characteristics of children’s semantic organization development.The corpus was taken from the Chinese narrative corpus in the CHILDES platform(10texts with a total of around 3,000 characters for each age group).Based on the method combining treebanks with language networks,this paper analyzed the semantic dependency treebanks and semantic dependency networks of all age groups from two aspects,and tried to answer the following questions:(1)What are the differences in the semantic dependency types and the mean semantic dependency distances for the semantic dependency treebanks of children aged 3 to 6?(2)What do the general network structures and descriptive parameters reveal about the semantic organization development of children aged 3 to 6?The results showed that:(1)Two semantic dependency types,EXP and MEAS,changed dramatically with the growth of age.The proportion of EXP declined obviously with the age,and the proportion of MEAS increased with the age,showing the development of the perception of the outside world,the subjective initiative and classifier acquisition for children aged 3 to 6;(2)The mean semantic dependency distance of children aged from 3to 6 increased continuously,reflecting the development of children’s semantic organization complexity and working memory capacity;(3)The language networks of children aged 3 to6 all showed small-world and scale-free characteristics,indicating that they were a kind of complex network,and the parameters such as average degree and clustering coefficient in the network also reflected the development of children’s ability to combine semantic units;(4)The statistical results of high-degree nodes showed that children preferred to different lexical resources at different ages for their semantic organization,revealing their development of language and cognitive ability.Children aged 3 depended more on the personal pronouns,demonstrative pronouns,inanimate nouns,and the linking verb “是 shi”;children aged 4 began to use more temporal nouns and animate nouns,and reduced the usage of demonstrative pronouns;children aged 5 began to increase the use of the plural personal pronouns;children aged 6 used more animate nouns.This study uses dependency semantic analysis to reveal the characteristics and rules of semantic organization development of children aged 3 to 6,which can provide a reference for related research in some fields such as language acquisition and language teaching.Meanwhile,relevant parameters can also be regarded as norms,helpful for early screening and intervention treatment of children with language disorders.