An Introduction to Network Analysis for Psycholinguists

Hello and welcome!

This website was created to host materials related to a network analysis tutorial provided at the Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum (https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html) on 10th August 2022 and at CompCog 2023 on 1st February 2023. The goal of the tutorial is to provide a (very) gentle and broad introduction to network analysis. Hence, the materials are missing a lot of technical detail and you are encouraged to refer to other reference materials and publications for further reading. Nevertheless, I hope that these materials will showcase the potential of network analysis for language scientists and whet your appetite for learning more about networks!

Cynthia Siew

Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore

Abstract

Network Science is a branch of complexity science that uses methods from graph theory to study the structure and dynamics of complex systems from a wide range of topics, such as the Internet, social networks, and ecological systems. The aim of this tutorial is to showcase how methods from Network Science can be useful for understanding language systems; in particular, how various forms of linguistic information are organized in the mental lexicon and how different network measures can provide information about the micro-, meso-, and macro-scale structure of language networks. The tutorial will begin with a gentle introduction to the field of Network Science and provide examples of its application in recent psycholinguistic studies. This is followed by a demonstration of how to conduct basic network analysis and network visualization in R (using the igraph package).

Contact

If you spot any errors or have any feedback on these materials, please do not hesitate to contact me at hello at cloud dot csqsiew dot xyz

You can also open an issue at the site’s Github page here.

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