Future Projects
The Form-Meaning systematicity of the early lexicon
In this project we ask whether the early vocabulary is completely arbitrary on a form-meaning level or whether the relationship between form and meaning is more systematic. Monaghan et al. (2014) investigated the systematicity of childrens' lexica aged 2-13+ years. They found that the early lexicon is more systematic than the later lexicon. We aim to extend Monaghan et al.'s findings to a younger age group, i.e., children between 16-35 months of age. We use individual longitudinal CDI data from Norwegian children (wordbank.edu) and calculate how systematic their vocabulary is at each time of observation. We define the systematicity as the correlation of phonological distance (phoneme feature distance) between all possible word pairs to the semantic distance (word2vec trained on CHILDES) between the same word pairs. In addition, we will do the same with normative data, i.e., data which is not from individual children but averaged over many children.
