Lexical and affective models in early acquisition of semantics

Motivated by theories of early language development in children we investigate the contribution of affective features to early acquisition of lexical semantics. For the task of semantic similarity between words, semantic and affective spaces are modeled using network-based distributed semantic models. We propose a method for constructing semantic activations from a combination of lexical and affective relations and show that affective information plays a prominent role in our lexical development model.