Network statistics on early English Syntax: Structural criteria

Syntactic networks are window to the overall organization and structure of language. Its growing through language acquisition process could reveal interesting features. Here, the network view to language is briefly discussed as well as practical set of criteria to describe syntactic networks of child language. Notions such structure or full interpretation are subtle or non-existing in child language, but it doesn’t implies that it is unstructured at all. Based in this criteria we define also a measure close to MLU: 〈S〉, which is the mean size of structured strings. This document is mainly for practical purposes; first, it is an attempt to locate syntactic networks within the global study of language. But, overall, it is not a treatise where theoretical notions are discussed: It is presented a compendium of criteria which tries to be coherent and leads us to be able to extract interesting network information from data.