Visualizing the Knowledge Domain of Language Experience: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Research on language experience (LE) has covered numerous topics in psychology, linguistics, and other relative disciplines. Such research is based on people’s experiences of the world, and substantial attention has been paid to this subject. In order to investigate the foundation and influential works of LE studies, we adopt CiteSpace software to analyze 30,045 published articles/reviews from the Web of Science by focusing on the co-citation analysis in terms of discipline, articles, and journals. The results present that (1) language systems in LE research interact mutually rather than separate from each other and (2) bilingualism is always a hot topic in the past few decades and will be popular in the next decades. These findings further indicate some issues to be resolved. One is about the relations between language systems and the other is the psychological interpretation in language experiences conflicts in practical language use.