Visualizing the Knowledge Domain of Motor Speech Disorders: A Scientific Review (2000-2019)

Abstract This review visualizes the knowledge domain of motor speech disorders (MSDs) in linguistics between 2000 and 2019 by means of scientometric methods. With topic searches, the study collected 869 bibliographic records and 20, 411 references from Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) of Thomson Reuter. The clustered and visualized document co-citation network of the MSDs knowledge domain in CiteSpace identifies 15 research foci in different periods, including apraxia of speech, acoustics, children, technology, aphemia, childhood apraxia of speech, primary progressive aphasia, speech motor delay, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, rhythm, foreign accent syndrome, phonation, phonological awareness, dose and speech perception. Revolving around linguistics, these foci could be divided into studies on speech characteristics of MSDs in terms of phonology and phonetics, remedies for MSDs in terms of neurolinguistics and acoustic phonetics, dysarthria secondary to neurological diseases based on pathological linguistics, subtypes of apraxia of speech, methods of MSDs based on auditory phonetics and a newly recognized subtype of MSDs. Meanwhile, the emerging trends of MSDs in linguistics are detected by the analysis of reference citation bursts, suggesting growing research in remedies for MSDs with the focus on assessments and effectiveness of treatments, speech characteristics and indexes of dysarthria secondary to neurological diseases and assistance to diagnose apraxia of speech. To sum up, the review has indicated that the acoustic measures to assess MSDs and acoustic remedies for dysarthria may not only be the past foci but also be future trends.