Visualizing Language and Aging From 2013-2022

Abstract

Abstract 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.