Volume 47, Issue 4

This paper aims to visualize the research of aphasia from a linguistic perspective for the two decades from 2000 to 2019, identifying the changes in research focus and the future emerging trends of aphasia studies in linguistics. Applying the bibliometric approach, the present study reviewed 3,004 publications with the topic word “aphasia” in the framework of linguistics. The dataset was created from the Web of Science database ranging from 2000 to 2019. Using the CiteSpace tool, document co-citation analysis, betweenness centrality (BC) measurement and citation burst detection were conducted to explore and determine the thematic patterns, critical studies, and emerging trends of this knowledge domain. Twelve thematic patterns in these two decades were identified, indicating that researchers have focused on language impairment in aphasia, aphasia therapy and other topics associated with aphasia. Meanwhile, papers with high BC reveal the connections among different research clusters. In addition, bursts of detected citations demonstrate that treatment aiming at the enhanced quality of daily life, the utilization of discourse tasks and treatments at the discourse level, deeper exploration of primary progressive aphasia in terms of clinical data and the application of working memory assessment, and the role of working memory (WM) training in rehabilitation will possibly attract more attention in the future. On the basis of the cluster landscape, BC and citation bursts, the review found that scholars paid extensive attention to the alleviation of communication deficits in the linguistic exploration of aphasia.

Previous studies on idiom comprehension of patients with aphasia (PWAs) mainly focused on Indo-European speakers, examining whether PWAs could correctly extract the target meaning of idioms, while among Chinese PWAs, idiom familiarity, context and other variables affecting idiom comprehension were rarely studied. Hence, this study aims to explore whether Chinese PWAs can correctly comprehend the target meaning of idioms, and further investigate the role of familiarity and context. For three Chinese PWAs, this study adopted the string-to-word matching task, taking Chinese four-character idioms as the experimental stimuli, and provided decoy words containing target meaning, literal meaning, unrelated abstract meaning and unrelated concrete meaning as the matching words of idiom items by manipulating the familiarity and contextual presence of idiom items. The results suggested that the PWAs could not correctly extract the target meaning of idioms and presented both the literal meaning tendency and the weak abstract meaning tendency, and the influence of familiarity on the comprehension of idioms was stronger than that of context. These results support the Graded Salience Hypothesis .

The public’s attitudes can affect the experience of stuttering of people who stutter. This study investigated the attitudes held by the public about people who stutter in China. A web-based written survey with closed and open-ended questions was implemented to develop a rich understanding. One hundred and two respondents in 26 provinces and 3 municipalities provided comments on people who stutter in their life aspects such as personality, speech, social life, work, life participation, education, dating and marriage, capability, and communication skills. The predominantly negative attitudes towards the overall domains were identified. Attitudes to people who stutter varied according to the different sources of knowledge. Familiarity with people who stutter might reduce stereotypes. However, knowledge from the media might aggravate stereotypes. Implications and future research orientation were also discussed.

This study explored the construction of power relations in the cognitive assessment of older adults within the Chinese clinical context. Data is derived from audio and video recordings that nine older adults produced in the cognitive assessment of the Chinese version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment-Basic (MoCA-B), which were then annotated and analyzed from a multimodal pragmatic perspective. The study reveals that examiners and older adults employed various speech acts to achieve distinct communicative goals, with power relations between them being reflected through these speech acts. Examiners tend to claim high power, utilizing discourse strategies such as request, interruption, evaluation, rhetorical questions, and directive speech acts. In contrast, older adults assert high power through directive speech acts, rhetorical questions, and interruptions. Both parties also exhibit low power by using confirming questions and explanations. Additionally, gestures, smiles, prosody features, and other non-verbal communicative resources are synergistically employed to exercise power. The interactive mechanism of constructing power relations reveals that age affects older adults’ power relations construction even in a professional setting of the Chinese context. The negotiation between the advanced age of older adults and the expertise of examiners jointly shapes power relations in their interactions.

Declining cognitive abilities can be a concomitant of advanced age. As language is closely associated with cognitive abilities, changes in language abilities can be an important marker of changes in cognitive abilities. The current study is to review cognitive studies of language and aging by first identifying and exploring the major clusters and pivotal articles and then detecting emerging trends. Data of 3, 266 articles on language and aging from 2013 to 2022 were collected from the Web of Science Core Collection database. Adopting Document Co-citation Analysis, Freeman’s betweenness centrality metric (Freeman, 2002) and Kleinberg’s burst detection algorithm (Kleinberg, 2002), we explored major clusters, pivotal articles and emerging trends in this field. Cognition appears to be the most remarkable cluster. Bilingualism, speech production, listening effort, and reading comprehension are other major active clusters in a certain period. The most recent active cluster concerns the studies of Alzheimer’s disease. Articles serving as pivotal points concentrate on cognitive studies of the Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL), the new Ease of Language Understanding model (EUL) and a hierarchical multi-representational generative framework of language comprehension. The progress in statistical methods, the relationship between language and cognitive impairment and the relationship between language abilities and cognition are the emerging trends. These emerging trends will provide some insights into how cognitive abilities influence language abilities in aging.

Smoothed cepstral peak prominence (CPPs) is a measurement of the distance from the prominent cepstral peak to the linear regression line directly beneath it. Variations of CPPs data acquisition and analysis lead to the complexity of the clinical cut-off values, and there are no agreeable values for a specific voice disorder, such as hypokinetic dysarthria associated with Parkinson’s disease (PD). This study examined the CPPs in people with hypokinetic dysarthria associated with PD compared with healthy participants. Results demonstrated significant differences in speech tasks of sustained vowel and connected speech, with CPPs of connected speech more sensitive to dysphonia and gender difference in PD participants. Males in PD participants presented higher CPPs for sustained vowels and lower CPPs for connected speech than females. It is implied that a consistent clinical application protocol is necessary, and multiple acoustic measures are needed to ensure the accuracy of clinical decisions.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often encounter difficulties in language learning and utilization, a concern that has gained significant academic attention, particularly given the widespread occurrence of ASD globally. Previous reviews, however, have relied on empirical observations rather than a more rigorous selection criterion. This preliminary study seeks to systematize the scientific knowledge base regarding language development in autistic children by utilizing the analysis tool Citespace 6.2.R5. We visualized and analyzed research patterns and trends regarding autism by drawing data from the Web of Science. Through document citation and emerging trend analyses, seven key research clusters and their chronological associations are identified, along with research hotspots such as language disorder diagnosis and intervention, social communication, language acquisition, and multilingual and multicultural influences. Research findings show that there exist some issues with the current research, including small sample sizes, the need for further investigation into receptive language development, and a lack of cross-cultural comparative studies. Meanwhile, the scope and depth of interdisciplinary research on language development in autistic children also need to be further enhanced. The research contributes to the extant literature by providing valuable references for autism researchers and practitioners.