The Landscape of Vocabulary Acquisition Research: A Psycholinguistic Exploration through Citation Metrics

Abstract

Goal. This study undertakes a comprehensive synthesis of vocabulary acquisition research through the lens of psycholinguistics. A targeted analysis was conducted on articles published in four premier psycholinguistic journals indexed in Scopus: Applied Psycholinguistics, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Psycholinguistics Journal, and East European Journal of Psycholinguistics. Methods. Utilizing the Dimensions database, we scrutinized the abstracts of 2,001 articles spanning the period from 1971 to 2022. Our analysis centered on emerging research themes and employed various citation metrics. Results. Our findings identified several prominent clusters of research themes, including the challenges of reading comprehension, the verbal behaviors exhibited by learners during vocabulary acquisition, the cognitive awareness of morphological functions in acquired vocabulary, and the neuropsychological mechanisms underpinning bilingual language production and comprehension. Notably, the Spanish language emerged as the most frequently studied target language across the selected journals. In terms of academic influence, our analysis revealed that, apart from one of the targeted journals serving as a leading co-cited source, other major co-cited journals predominantly belonged to the fields of neurolinguistics and psychology. The article concludes by proposing multiple avenues for future research in this dynamic and interdisciplinary domain.