Towards an Automatic Measurement of Verbal Lexicon Acquisition: The Case for a Young Children-versus-Adults Classification in French and Mandarin

Towards an automatic measurement of verbal lexicon acquisition: the case for a young children-vs-adults categorization in French and Mandarin ⋆ Yann Desalle a, Shu-Kai Hsieh b, Bruno Gaume c, and Hintat Cheung b aOctogone, Universit´e de Toulouse,Toulouse, France yann.desalle@univ-tlse2.fr bGraduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan {shukai, hintat}@ntu.edu.tw cCLLE-ERSS, CNRS - Universit´e de Toulouse, Toulouse, France gaume@univ-tlse2.fr Abstract. In this paper we define a lexical metrology in graphs of verbal synonymy to com- pute the flexsemic score of speakers from their verbal productions in action denomination tasks. This flexsemic score is used to automatically categorize young children versus young adults. We show that this score is effective in French and in Mandarin. Keywords: automatic categorization, Flexsem, language acquisition, Prox 1 Introduction This paper focuses on the automatic measurement of verbal lexicon acquisition. Our research combine two sides: a psychological side and a computational side. In a recent work (Gaume et al., 2008) we showed that the psychological results on verbal lexicon acquisition fit our computational model of the semantic organization of the verbal lexicon. Based on these results, we propose here to use our computational model to build a measurement of the lexical acquisition useful to categorize the healthy young children vs. healthy adults. The first part of this paper presents the Approx protocol, the data collected in French and Man- darin and the first psychological results about verbal lexicon acquisition. Then, the second part accounts for the computational model and describes three preliminary measurements useful in our categorization while the next section describes how to assign a “flexsemic” score to a participant. Then, the way we used this score for the categorization task and the results analysis are exposed. This paper ends with a short presentation of the web platform Flexsem usable to build online categorizations. 2 Approx protocol 2.1 General overview In order to compare the lexical acquisition of verbs in French and Mandarin, we used the Approx protocol initially built to study the production of verbal approximations and the hierarchical di- mension of the lexicon in normal and pathological development (Duvignau et al., 2005; Gaume et al., 2008). The material of this protocol consists in 17 speechless action-movies divided as in Table 1 into 3 action concepts: TO DETERIORATE, TO REMOVE, TO SEPARATE In each movie, a woman alters an object from an initial state to a final state with the help of her hands or with an instrument. ⋆ The research presented in this paper is supported by the ANR-NSC (France-Taiwan) bilateral project M3 (Modeling and Measurement of Meaning). Copyright 2010 by Yann Desalle, Shu-Kai Hsieh, Bruno Gaume, and Hintat Cheung PACLIC 24 Proceedings 809 Table 1: The 17 action movies of the Approx protocol TO DETERIORATE TO REMOVE TO SEPARATE Burst a balloon Peel a carrot Make bread-crumbs Crumple a piece of paper Peel an orange Cut a bread Break a glass Pull the bark of a log off Break a bread off Crush a tomato Undress a doll Chop parsley Tear off …

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