COSMOS: Experimental and Comparative Studies of Concept Representations in Schoolchildren

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 5251–5260 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 5251 COSMOS: Experimental and Comparative Studies of Concept Representations in Schoolchildren Jeanne Villaneau1, Farida Sa¨ıd2 1,2IRISA-D6 - MEDIA ET INTERACTIONS,2LMBA 1,2Universit´e de Bretagne Sud, France {jeanne.villaneau, farida.said}@univ-ubs.fr Abstract COSMOS is a multidisciplinary research project investigating schoolchildren’s beliefs and representations of specific concepts under control variables (age, gender, language spoken at home). Seven concepts are studied: friend, father, mother, villain, work, television and dog. We first present the protocol used and the data collected from a survey of 184 children in two age groups (6-7 and 9-11 years) in four schools in Brittany (France). A word-level lexical study shows that children’s linguistic proficiency and lexical diversity increase with age, and we observe an interaction effect between gender and age on lexical diversity as measured with MLR (Measure of Lexical Richness). In contrast, none of the control variables affects lexical density. We also present the lemmas that schoolchildren most often associate with each concept. Generalized linear mixed-effects models reveal significant effects of age, gender, and home language on some concept-lemma associations and specific interactions between age and gender. Most of the identified effects are documented in the child development literature. To better understand the process of semantic construction in children, additional lexical analyses at the n-gram, chunk, and clause levels would be helpful. We briefly present ongoing and planned work in this direction. The COSMOS data will soon be made freely available to the scientific community. Keywords: children survey, conceptual representations, lexical richness, lexical diversity, mixed-effects models 1. Introduction COSMOS1 (”Construction S´emantique du MOnde et St´er´eotypes” [Semantic Construction of the World and Stereotypes]) is a French research project bringing to- gether linguists and data scientists to study conceptual representations in schoolchildren aged 6 to 11. The project is supported by the MSHB (Maison des Sci- ences de l’Homme en Bretagne), a research unit that promotes interdisciplinary collaborative research at the heart of human and social sciences. The project consists of conducting surveys in which children put certain concepts into words and, through their verbalizations, study their conceptual representa- tions at two points in their schooling while considering sociodemographic and cultural factors. Beyond the in- terest of this knowledge per se, the outcomes have a didactic aim: to understand and evaluate the process of acquiring a semantic competence that goes beyond the referential use of words and, in the long run, to provide tools that will help prevent caricatural or fallacious pre- suppositions. There seem to be universal stages in children’s cogni- tive development, although these are subject to debate. Concrete operational stage occurs between ages 7 and 11: children become less egocentric, can solve com- plex problems, and acquire classification skills (Babakr et al., 2015). For example, by age 6-7, children can co- ordinate multiple social categories. By 10-12 years, de- velopment involves generalizations about concrete ob- 1https://www.mshb.fr/projets_mshb/ cosmos/6694/ jects and events and the ability …

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