Knowledge mapping of the research on lexical inferencing: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Lexical inferencing functions as one of the most important and effective skills used in language comprehension pertaining to psychological, cognitive and neurological aspects. Given its complex nature and crucial role in language comprehension, lexical inferencing has received considerable attention. The present study visualized the knowledge domain of the research on lexical inferencing based on a total of 472 articles collected from Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection of Thomson Reuters from 2001 to 2021. The bibliographic data were analyzed through co-cited articles, co-citation clusters of references, and co-occurring keywords to identify holistic intellectual landscape of lexical inferencing with special focus on its intellectual structure and base, and hot research topics. The main intellectual base includes probability of activating lexical inferencing in working memory and encoding in long-term memory, the role of lexical inferencing in reading comprehension, in connected speech, in children’s derivation under pragmatic context, and in psychological and neurocognitive processes underlying language processing mechanism. Hot topics are comprised the impacts of lexical inferencing on language acquisition and comprehension (written and spoken language comprehension), the factors (context variables, vocabulary knowledge, and morphological awareness) affecting the presence and efficacy of lexical inferencing, and the time course of lexical inferencing during reading. Critically, the results of this study demonstrated that the contribution of lexical inferencing to language comprehension was strongly correlated with learner-related and discourse-related variables. The study shed valuable light on the understanding of the intellectual background and the dynamic patterns of lexical inferencing over the past two decades, thereby future work in lexical inferencing is suggested as well.

The Role of Learning Style Preference and Lexical Inferencing Strategies on the Reading Comprehension of Education Students: A Mixed-Methods Study

“…This finding resonates with the study conducted by Kinjari and Gopal in 2020, which emphasized how adolescent school students, with preferred learning styles such as Kinesthetic, Visual, and Auditory, can enhance their learning effectiveness both within and outside the classroom, thereby facilitating selfdirected learning. Lastly, the findings are in harmony with the research of Yang, et al (2023), which both underscore the significance of lexical inferencing strategies in bolstering reading comprehension.…”

Mapping the Knowledge Domain of Text Inferencing

“…The search strategy and the inclusion criteria were detailed in Figure 1. The selection of search terms for this study is informed by the bibliometric analysis of lexical inferencing conducted by Yang et al (2023). A total of 3,131 records were obtained from 1,306 journals distributed in 200 WoS categories.…”