Linguistic insights into dementia from 1994 to 2023: A structural topic modeling-assisted bibliometric analysis

Abstract

This article presents a bibliometric analysis of research on dementia in the field of linguistics. We reviewed and analyzed 545 articles published in 89 peer-reviewed journals between 1994 and 2023, to identify key bibliometric information and major research topics in this expanding field of research. The distribution of countries indicates that the United States is the most productive country, and researchers from the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada also play an important role. Aphasiology and Brain and Language are the most influential journals in terms of research productivity and impact. The analysis of highly cited references demonstrates the intellectual foundation of this research field. The topics generated by structural topic modeling show that scholars in linguistics have responded to a variety of issues on dementia, encompassing semantic processing, multilingualism and cognitive functions, primary progressive aphasia and apraxia of speech, natural language processing techniques, the role of speech-language pathologists, communication dynamics in contexts, speech processing, syntactic processing, and word retrieval and language processing. This study aims to enhance researchers’ understanding of the current state of this research field and provide insights for future studies.