The Topology of Synonymy and Homonymy Networks

Semantic networks have been used successfully to explain access to the mental lexicon. Topological analyses of these networks have focused on acquisition and generation. We extend this work to look at models that distinguish semantic relations. We find the scale-free properties of association networks are not found in synonymy-homonymy networks, and that this is consistent with studies of childhood acquisition of these relationships. We further find that distributional models of language acquisition display similar topological properties to these networks.