Early Language Learning via Spreading Activation and Category Exploration in Complex Networks

2026-07-07

AI Summary

This study investigates the unevenness in children’s early vocabulary acquisition across semantic domains and lexical categories, along with its underlying mechanisms. Modeling early word learning as a search process over a graph-structured mental lexicon, the work proposes a novel mechanism in which spreading activation and forced category exploration interact synergistically. The model demonstrates that lexical development is jointly driven by activation dynamics and constraints on category access. Leveraging a complex network framework integrated with CDI (Communicative Development Inventories) categorization and Wordbank age-norm data, the approach is validated across four languages, significantly outperforming a shortest-path baseline and more accurately capturing empirically observed patterns of category exploration and transitions in vocabulary growth.

Abstract

Is word acquisition in children uneven with respect to semantic and lexical categories? To answer this question, we model early language learning as a search on a graph-based mental lexicon, driven by two interacting processes: spreading activation and an enforced exploration (rather than exploitation) of lexical categories. We evaluate model performance on four languages (German, English, Dutch, and Rioplatense Spanish), using CDIs as ground-truth data for lexical categories, normative ages derived from the Wordbank repository, and state-of-the-art resources for reconstructing graphs of word similarities. We find that spreading activation outperforms a shortest path baseline in simulating normative word acquisition. At the category level, we highlight complex transitions between CDIs. By studying their sequences in terms of burstiness and average persistence time within the same CDI, we find that spreading activation better captures the exploration dynamics observed empirically. Overall, our findings suggest that vocabulary development can be understood through the non-trivial interplay between activation dynamics and some degree of constraints regulating the visiting of lexical categories in complex networks.

Problem

• early language learning
• lexical categories
• word acquisition
• semantic development
• vocabulary development

Innovation

• spreading activation
• lexical category exploration
• mental lexicon as complex network
• word acquisition modeling
• burstiness in language learning