A Visualized Analysis Of Studies On Language Attrition:A Bibliometricapproach With CiteSpace ?

It is known to all that language acquisition not only contains the aspect of learning,but also includes the aspect of loss and attrition.Researchers and educators focused on foreign language teaching and learning for centuries.It is not until the 1980 s,language attrition,the reverse process of language acquisition,started to attract interests from scholars and educators.After the Conference on the Attrition of Language Skills held at the University of Pennsylvania in May 1980,language attrition attracted enough attention from scholars and became a source of scientific interest.The conference became the turning point of the beginning of language attrition study from a non-pathological perspective.Since then,research on language attrition from the linguistic perspective is in full bloom.Scholars from all over the world studied language attrition from various angles.This study,taking language attrition as research topic,will apply a bibliometric approach to investigate the disciplinary structure and active topics of language attrition.Four sub-databases(SCI-EXPANDED,SSCI,A&HCI,CPCI-SSH)of the Web of Science were chosen as the data sources.Originally,altogether 1918 records were gathered.Removing dupulicates from the 1918 records through Cite Space ?,1839 records were gathered eventually and analyzed through an integrated mapping knowledge domain which includes techniques such as keyword co-occurrence analysis,cluster analysis and co-citation analysis.The software applied in this research is mainly Cite Space ?.The present study was designed to investigate the following questions through a bibliometric approach:(1)What is the current research status on language attrition?(2)How does the discipline evolve?(3)What are the emerging trends and active issues in studies on language attrition?This study indicates that the publication of research papers on language attrition remains a stable annual growth,so do the citations each year.There are 22 authors who published five papers or more on language attrition,among which Schmid Monika and Richard A.Blythe published over ten articles respectively in this field before 2017.USA published 630 articles on language attrition research among those 1839 items and these 630 articles take up a percentage of 34.26.These researches are mainly done in numerous universities and colleges in America,such as university of Illinois,university of California at Los Angeles,Pennsylvania State University and other education institutions.In the co-citation analysis,the most prominent article in the visualization is William Labow-2007 entitled Transmission and diffusion.The node of Labov-2007,with its co-cited frequency of 25 and centrality of 0.13,was circled in purple,which means that it plays an important role in connecting and forming the network.Node Tagliamonte SA—2009,with its citing frequency of 20,together with the article Labov-2007 and other nodes form the largest natural cluster of co-citation network.In keywords co-occurrence analysis,there are four key nodes(of high centrality)apart from language and English,which are children,bilingualism,perception and aphasia.“Children”,with its centrality of 0.46,becomes the top ranked item in the network.It appeared in 91 records in the dataset collected.“Perception”,with centrality of 0.43,ranked second by centrality in the keywords co-occurrence network.What's more,making a burst-detection in the network of keywords co-occurrence network of language attrition,eight burst terms or phrases were detected.They are aphasia,language,children,language change,epilepsy,language maintenance,language evolution and alzheimers disease ranked by their strength of burst.Clustering the keywords co-occurrence networks,four prominent clusters were generated.Cluster A represents the specialty on language attrition from the pathological and cognitive perspectives.It includes the research fronts of aphasia,alzheimers disease,epilepsy,memory and dementia.Only Cluster A is red in color,which means that research fronts appeared in the cluster are relatively,namely they are the emerging topics evolved in researches on language attrition.This study provides a quantitative overview of language attrition research and offers a visualized insight into the language attrition research in terms of current research status,evolution of the discipline,key issues and emerging trends.It is hoped that the findings of this study can offer a scientific reference to language attrition research and language learning and teaching,which will be valuable to scholars,researchers and language teachers and anyone interested in the research of language attrition in the future.