Developmental Study Of Chinese Language Syntax Of Children Aged 3 To 10 Based On Dependency Grammar

Children‘s language development is the initial stage of human language and contributes to physical and mental development.At home and abroad,research on children‘s syntactic development involves lexical development,structure relation and sentence length.However,they failed to describe the overall syntactic development of children in large successive age groups and ignored the internal relation between words.Besides,syntactic development has something to do with working memory which to some extent can promote or limit syntactic development.Thus,it is meaningful to study the characteristics of working memory development.This paper studies the syntactic dependency treebanks and syntactic dependency networks of children aged 3 to 10 in detail from the perspective of language complex networks,and tries to answer the following questions:(1)What are the overall characteristics of the syntactic dependency networks of children aged 3 to 10 from a language complex network perspective?(2)What characteristics are revealed about the syntactic development of children aged 3 to 10 by their network parameters?(3)What characteristics are revealed about the working memory development of children aged 3 to 10 by their mean dependency distances? Data was taken from the personal narrative corpus in the children‘s corpus of CHILDES.Based on dependency grammar,the author constructed dependency treebanks and dependency networks,and analyzed the number of word nodes,the number of edges,clustering coefficient,average path length and degree distribution in eight syntactic dependency networks,as well as the average dependency distance in dependency treebanks.The results involve three aspects.Firstly,the eight syntactic dependency networks possess scale-free and small-world properties by fitting the power-law of the degree distribution of syntactic dependency networks and comparing their clustering coefficient and average path length with those in corresponding random networks.Secondly,by analyzing the changes of the number of word nodes,the number of edges,the clustering coefficient and the average path length,it is found that the vocabulary ability of children aged 3-7 lags behind the ability of syntax,and the syntax of children after 7 years old lags behind the ability of vocabulary.Thirdly,based on dependency treebanks,working memory develops rapidly from 3 to 4 years old,and tends to level off from 9 to10 years old.And children‘s working memory has not reached the average level of adults.This study provides some implications:(1)concerning children language development,researchers can adopt the methods of network science and modern quantitative linguistics to study the language subsystems from macroscopic and microscopic angle;(2)since obvious differences in the syntactic relations and vocabulary development between preschool and school-aged children,parents should pay attention to the vocabulary input of preschool children,and teachers should pay attention to promote the ability of flexible application of syntactic relations and vocabulary of school-age children;(3)this study explores the characteristics of syntactic development and working memory development of normal children to provide some references for children‘s language development norms.