I am preparing a study on semantic networks based on word vectors trained on the Clinical English Gillam corpus (Gillam & Pearson 2004) containing narratives of children with typical language development and specific language impairment (SLI). The aim is to analyse the structure of those semantic networks at different stages of acquisition with the hypothesis that a 'small-world structure', characterized by prominent hub words with many connections and local clusters of closely related words, will be found in typically developing children while a network with less dominant hubs and more evenly linked nodes will be found for children with SLI. Small-world network allows, in theory, effective search strategies in local clusters as well as across distant domains via the hub nodes (Watts & Strogatz 1998; Steyvers & Tenenbaum 2005) which is why I assume that its disruption should occur in SLI. Special focus will lie on whether this network measure would be able to distinguish typical and SLI children with similar mean length of utterance in which case this network measure would outperform a traditional psycholinguistic measure used to diagnose SLI (Rice et al. 2010).
