A semantic space for modeling children's semantic memory

Guy Denhière (1) , Benoît Lemaire (2) , Cédrick Bellissens , Sandra Jhean-Larose

1 LPC - Laboratoire de psychologie cognitive
2 Leibniz - IMAG - Laboratoire Leibniz

The goal of this paper is to present a model of children's semantic memory, which is based on a corpus reproducing the kinds of texts children are exposed to. After presenting the literature in the development of the semantic memory, a preliminary French corpus of 3.2 million words is described. Similarities in the resulting semantic space are compared to human data on four tests: association norms, vocabulary test, semantic judgments and memory tasks. A second corpus is described, which is composed of subcorpora corresponding to various ages. This stratified corpus is intended as a basis for developmental studies. Finally, two applications of these models of semantic memory are presented: the first one aims at tracing the development of semantic similarities paragraph by paragraph; the second one describes an implementation of a model of text comprehension derived from the Construction-integration model (Kintsch, 1988, 1998) and based on such models of semantic memory.

Mots clés: Latent Semantic Analysis; corpus; children; semantic memory

Domaines: Psychologie; Informatique; Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Guy Denhière, Benoît Lemaire, Cédrick Bellissens, Sandra Jhean-Larose. A semantic space for modeling children's semantic memory. Landauer, T.K., McNamara, D.S., Dennis, S., Kintsch, W. The handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp.143-165, 2007. ⟨hal-00282856⟩