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.

Cognitive neuroscience of aging (CNA) is a relatively young field compared with other branches of cognitive aging (CA). From the beginning of this century, scholars in CNA have contributed many valuable research to explain the cognitive ability decline in aging brains in terms of functional changes, neuromechanism, and neurodegenerative diseases. However, very few studies have systematically reviewed the research in the domain of CAN, with regard to its primary research topics, theories, findings, and future development. Therefore, this study used CiteSpace to conduct a bibliometric analysis of 1,462 published articles in CNA from Web of Science (WOS) and investigated the highly influential and potential research topics and theories of CNA, as well as important brain areas involved in CAN during 2000–2021. The results revealed that: (1) the research topics of “memory” and “attention” have been the focus of most studies, progressing into a fMRI-oriented stage; (2) the scaffolding theory and hemispheric asymmetry reduction in older adults model hold a key status in CNA, characterizing aging as a dynamic process and presenting compensatory relationships between different brain areas; and (3) age-related changes always occur in temporal (especially the hippocampus), parietal, and frontal lobes and the cognitive declines establish the compensation relationship between the anterior and posterior regions.

Previous psychological experiments have shown that predictive inference processing under different textual constraints is modulated by the directionality function of epistemic modality (EM) certainty within the context. Nevertheless, recent neuroscientific studies have not presented positive evidence for such a function during text reading. Consequently, the current study deposited Chinese EMs “也许” (possibly) and “一定” (surely) into a predictive inference context to examine using the ERP technique whether a directionality of EM certainty influences the processing of predictive inference. Two independent variables, namely textual constraint and EM certainty, were manipulated, and 36 participants were recruited. The results revealed that, in the anticipatory stage of predictive inference processing while under a weak textual constraint, low certainty evoked a larger N400 (300–500 ms) in the fronto-central and centro-parietal regions, indicating the augmentation of cognitive loads in calculating the possibility of representations of the forthcoming information. Meanwhile, high certainty elicited a right fronto-central late positive component (LPC) (500–700 ms) associated with semantically congruent but lexically unpredicted words. In the integration stage, low certainty resulted in larger right fronto-central and centro-frontal N400 (300–500 ms) effects in the weak textual constraint condition, associated with the facilitation of lexical-semantic retrieval or pre-activation, and high certainty successively elicited right fronto-central and centro-parietal LPC (500–700 ms) effects, associated respectively with lexical unpredictability and reanalysis of the sentence meaning. The results support the directionality function of EM certainty and reveal the complete neural processing of predictive inferences with high and low certainties under different textual constraint conditions.