Deciphering Children's Social Cognition: Leveraging NLP for Deeper Insights Into Social Role Perceptions
Résumé
This research uses natural language processing (NLP) methods to explore how children of varying genders and ages perceive social roles. By analyzing interview responses from 184 first- and fifth-grade French children, the study investigates their thoughts and beliefs about the concept of “friend.” Through a specialized NLP technique, the study categorizes the most common lemmas, revealing three main themes: similarity, support/intimacy, and association/affection. Statistical analyses of these patterns provide a deeper understanding of how children comprehend and interpret this social role. This research offers a unique perspective by focusing on the children's viewpoint, which contrasts with studies that mainly reflect the adult perspective.