Yan and Johnson's kinetic model, which has been developed for the purpose of describing wood delignification, recognizes the polymer network structure of lignin. Their model is experimentally examined with a synthetic network polymer. The starting material was functionalized monodisperse polystyrene crosslinked to yield networks in which the parameters of the theoretical equations were known. By the hydrolytic random cleavage of the crosslinks, kinetic data for this model network degradation experiment was obtained.