Geminate consonants and emergent systematicity: A network analysis

Decades of research into infants' early word productions has shown that the early vocabulary includes systematic templates, in which children use a small number of word-based patterns to produce many different words, both accurately and inaccurately. Recent studies have attempted to test for this early systematicity across large samples of data using network modelling to identify similarity across the early vocabulary. In this chapter, we draw together the traditional 'by hand' approach with a network approach to determine whether computational analysis of early production data might help us understand the nature of early production. We draw on data from 29 infants acquiring one of six languages to compare these methodological approaches. We discuss how they complement one another and address limitations.