research topic for language

How It Works
PhD thesis writing
Master thesis writing
Bachelor thesis writing
Dissertation writing service
Dissertation abstract writing
Thesis proposal writing
Thesis editing service
Thesis proofreading service
Thesis formatting service
Coursework writing service
Research paper writing service
Architecture thesis writing
Computer science thesis writing
Engineering thesis writing
History thesis writing
MBA thesis writing
Nursing dissertation writing
Psychology dissertation writing
Sociology thesis writing
Statistics dissertation writing
Buy dissertation online
Write my dissertation
Cheap thesis
Cheap dissertation
Custom dissertation
Dissertation help
Pay for thesis
Pay for dissertation
Senior thesis
Write my thesis

211 Research Topics in Linguistics To Get Top Grades

Many people find it hard to decide on their linguistics research topics because of the assumed complexities involved. They struggle to choose easy research paper topics for English language too because they think it could be too simple for a university or college level certificate.

All that you need to learn about Linguistics and English is sprawled across syntax, phonetics, morphology, phonology, semantics, grammar, vocabulary, and a few others. To easily create a top-notch essay or conduct a research study, you can consider this list of research topics in English language below for your university or college use. Note that you can fine-tune these to suit your interests.

Linguistics Research Paper Topics

If you want to study how language is applied and its importance in the world, you can consider these Linguistics topics for your research paper. They are:

An analysis of romantic ideas and their expression amongst French people
An overview of the hate language in the course against religion
Identify the determinants of hate language and the means of propagation
Evaluate a literature and examine how Linguistics is applied to the understanding of minor languages
Consider the impact of social media in the development of slangs
An overview of political slang and its use amongst New York teenagers
Examine the relevance of Linguistics in a digitalized world
Analyze foul language and how it’s used to oppress minors
Identify the role of language in the national identity of a socially dynamic society
Attempt an explanation to how the language barrier could affect the social life of an individual in a new society
Discuss the means through which language can enrich cultural identities
Examine the concept of bilingualism and how it applies in the real world
Analyze the possible strategies for teaching a foreign language
Discuss the priority of teachers in the teaching of grammar to non-native speakers
Choose a school of your choice and observe the slang used by its students: analyze how it affects their social lives
Attempt a critical overview of racist languages
What does endangered language means and how does it apply in the real world?
A critical overview of your second language and why it is a second language
What are the motivators of speech and why are they relevant?
Analyze the difference between the different types of communications and their significance to specially-abled persons
Give a critical overview of five literature on sign language
Evaluate the distinction between the means of language comprehension between an adult and a teenager
Consider a native American group and evaluate how cultural diversity has influenced their language
Analyze the complexities involved in code-switching and code-mixing
Give a critical overview of the importance of language to a teenager
Attempt a forensic overview of language accessibility and what it means
What do you believe are the means of communications and what are their uniqueness?
Attempt a study of Islamic poetry and its role in language development
Attempt a study on the role of Literature in language development
Evaluate the Influence of metaphors and other literary devices in the depth of each sentence
Identify the role of literary devices in the development of proverbs in any African country
Cognitive Linguistics: analyze two pieces of Literature that offers a critical view of perception
Identify and analyze the complexities in unspoken words
Expression is another kind of language: discuss
Identify the significance of symbols in the evolution of language
Discuss how learning more than a single language promote cross-cultural developments
Analyze how the loss of a mother tongue affect the language Efficiency of a community
Critically examine how sign language works
Using literature from the medieval era, attempt a study of the evolution of language
Identify how wars have led to the reduction in the popularity of a language of your choice across any country of the world
Critically examine five Literature on why accent changes based on environment
What are the forces that compel the comprehension of language in a child
Identify and explain the difference between the listening and speaking skills and their significance in the understanding of language
Give a critical overview of how natural language is processed
Examine the influence of language on culture and vice versa
It is possible to understand a language even without living in that society: discuss
Identify the arguments regarding speech defects
Discuss how the familiarity of language informs the creation of slangs
Explain the significance of religious phrases and sacred languages
Explore the roots and evolution of incantations in Africa

Sociolinguistic Research Topics

You may as well need interesting Linguistics topics based on sociolinguistic purposes for your research. Sociolinguistics is the study and recording of natural speech. It’s primarily the casual status of most informal conversations. You can consider the following Sociolinguistic research topics for your research:

What makes language exceptional to a particular person?
How does language form a unique means of expression to writers?
Examine the kind of speech used in health and emergencies
Analyze the language theory explored by family members during dinner
Evaluate the possible variation of language based on class
Evaluate the language of racism, social tension, and sexism
Discuss how Language promotes social and cultural familiarities
Give an overview of identity and language
Examine why some language speakers enjoy listening to foreigners who speak their native language
Give a forensic analysis of his the language of entertainment is different to the language in professional settings
Give an understanding of how Language changes
Examine the Sociolinguistics of the Caribbeans
Consider an overview of metaphor in France
Explain why the direct translation of written words is incomprehensible in Linguistics
Discuss the use of language in marginalizing a community
Analyze the history of Arabic and the culture that enhanced it
Discuss the growth of French and the influences of other languages
Examine how the English language developed and its interdependence on other languages
Give an overview of cultural diversity and Linguistics in teaching
Challenge the attachment of speech defect with disability of language listening and speaking abilities
Explore the uniqueness of language between siblings
Explore the means of making requests between a teenager and his parents
Observe and comment on how students relate with their teachers through language
Observe and comment on the communication of strategy of parents and teachers
Examine the connection of understanding first language with academic excellence

Language Research Topics

Numerous languages exist in different societies. This is why you may seek to understand the motivations behind language through these Linguistics project ideas. You can consider the following interesting Linguistics topics and their application to language:

What does language shift mean?
Discuss the stages of English language development?
Examine the position of ambiguity in a romantic Language of your choice
Why are some languages called romantic languages?
Observe the strategies of persuasion through Language
Discuss the connection between symbols and words
Identify the language of political speeches
Discuss the effectiveness of language in an indigenous cultural revolution
Trace the motivators for spoken language
What does language acquisition mean to you?
Examine three pieces of literature on language translation and its role in multilingual accessibility
Identify the science involved in language reception
Interrogate with the context of language disorders
Examine how psychotherapy applies to victims of language disorders
Study the growth of Hindi despite colonialism
Critically appraise the term, language erasure
Examine how colonialism and war is responsible for the loss of language
Give an overview of the difference between sounds and letters and how they apply to the German language
Explain why the placement of verb and preposition is different in German and English languages
Choose two languages of your choice and examine their historical relationship
Discuss the strategies employed by people while learning new languages
Discuss the role of all the figures of speech in the advancement of language
Analyze the complexities of autism and its victims
Offer a linguist approach to language uniqueness between a Down Syndrome child and an autist
Express dance as a language
Express music as a language
Express language as a form of language
Evaluate the role of cultural diversity in the decline of languages in South Africa
Discuss the development of the Greek language
Critically review two literary texts, one from the medieval era and another published a decade ago, and examine the language shifts

Linguistics Essay Topics

You may also need Linguistics research topics for your Linguistics essays. As a linguist in the making, these can help you consider controversies in Linguistics as a discipline and address them through your study. You can consider:

The connection of sociolinguistics in comprehending interests in multilingualism
Write on your belief of how language encourages sexism
What do you understand about the differences between British and American English?
Discuss how slangs grew and how they started
Consider how age leads to loss of language
Review how language is used in formal and informal conversation
Discuss what you understand by polite language
Discuss what you know by hate language
Evaluate how language has remained flexible throughout history
Mimicking a teacher is a form of exercising hate Language: discuss
Body Language and verbal speech are different things: discuss
Language can be exploitative: discuss
Do you think language is responsible for inciting aggression against the state?
Can you justify the structural representation of any symbol of your choice?
Religious symbols are not ordinary Language: what are your perspective on day-to-day languages and sacred ones?
Consider the usage of language by an English man and someone of another culture
Discuss the essence of code-mixing and code-switching
Attempt a psychological assessment on the role of language in academic development
How does language pose a challenge to studying?
Choose a multicultural society of your choice and explain the problem they face
What forms does Language use in expression?
Identify the reasons behind unspoken words and actions
Why do universal languages exist as a means of easy communication?
Examine the role of the English language in the world
Examine the role of Arabic in the world
Examine the role of romantic languages in the world
Evaluate the significance of each teaching Resources in a language classroom
Consider an assessment of language analysis
Why do people comprehend beyond what is written or expressed?
What is the impact of hate speech on a woman?
Do you believe that grammatical errors are how everyone’s comprehension of language is determined?
Observe the Influence of technology in language learning and development
Which parts of the body are responsible for understanding new languages
How has language informed development?
Would you say language has improved human relations or worsened it considering it as a tool for violence?
Would you say language in a black populous state is different from its social culture in white populous states?
Give an overview of the English language in Nigeria
Give an overview of the English language in Uganda
Give an overview of the English language in India
Give an overview of Russian in Europe
Give a conceptual analysis on stress and how it works
Consider the means of vocabulary development and its role in cultural relationships
Examine the effects of Linguistics in language
Present your understanding of sign language
What do you understand about descriptive language and prescriptive Language?

List of Research Topics in English Language

You may need English research topics for your next research. These are topics that are socially crafted for you as a student of language in any institution. You can consider the following for in-depth analysis:

Examine the travail of women in any feminist text of your choice
Examine the movement of feminist literature in the Industrial period
Give an overview of five Gothic literature and what you understand from them
Examine rock music and how it emerged as a genre
Evaluate the cultural association with Nina Simone’s music
What is the relevance of Shakespeare in English literature?
How has literature promoted the English language?
Identify the effect of spelling errors in the academic performance of students in an institution of your choice
Critically survey a university and give rationalize the literary texts offered as Significant
Examine the use of feminist literature in advancing the course against patriarchy
Give an overview of the themes in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”
Express the significance of Ernest Hemingway’s diction in contemporary literature
Examine the predominant devices in the works of William Shakespeare
Explain the predominant devices in the works of Christopher Marlowe
Charles Dickens and his works: express the dominating themes in his Literature
Why is Literature described as the mirror of society?
Examine the issues of feminism in Sefi Atta’s “Everything Good Will Come” and Bernadine Evaristos’s “Girl, Woman, Other”
Give an overview of the stylistics employed in the writing of “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernadine Evaristo
Describe the language of advertisement in social media and newspapers
Describe what poetic Language means
Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing on Mexican Americans
Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing in Indian Americans
Discuss the influence of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” on satirical literature
Examine the Linguistics features of “Native Son” by Richard Wright
What is the role of indigenous literature in promoting cultural identities
How has literature informed cultural consciousness?
Analyze five literature on semantics and their Influence on the study
Assess the role of grammar in day to day communications
Observe the role of multidisciplinary approaches in understanding the English language
What does stylistics mean while analyzing medieval literary texts?
Analyze the views of philosophers on language, society, and culture

English Research Paper Topics for College Students

For your college work, you may need to undergo a study of any phenomenon in the world. Note that they could be Linguistics essay topics or mainly a research study of an idea of your choice. Thus, you can choose your research ideas from any of the following:

The concept of fairness in a democratic Government
The capacity of a leader isn’t in his or her academic degrees
The concept of discrimination in education
The theory of discrimination in Islamic states
The idea of school policing
A study on grade inflation and its consequences
A study of taxation and Its importance to the economy from a citizen’s perspectives
A study on how eloquence lead to discrimination amongst high school students
A study of the influence of the music industry in teens
An Evaluation of pornography and its impacts on College students
A descriptive study of how the FBI works according to Hollywood
A critical consideration of the cons and pros of vaccination
The health effect of sleep disorders
An overview of three literary texts across three genres of Literature and how they connect to you
A critical overview of “King Oedipus”: the role of the supernatural in day to day life
Examine the novel “12 Years a Slave” as a reflection of servitude and brutality exerted by white slave owners
Rationalize the emergence of racist Literature with concrete examples
A study of the limits of literature in accessing rural readers
Analyze the perspectives of modern authors on the Influence of medieval Literature on their craft
What do you understand by the mortality of a literary text?
A study of controversial Literature and its role in shaping the discussion
A critical overview of three literary texts that dealt with domestic abuse and their role in changing the narratives about domestic violence
Choose three contemporary poets and analyze the themes of their works
Do you believe that contemporary American literature is the repetition of unnecessary themes already treated in the past?
A study of the evolution of Literature and its styles
The use of sexual innuendos in literature
The use of sexist languages in literature and its effect on the public
The disaster associated with media reports of fake news
Conduct a study on how language is used as a tool for manipulation
Attempt a criticism of a controversial Literary text and why it shouldn’t be studied or sold in the first place

Finding Linguistics Hard To Write About?

With these topics, you can commence your research with ease. However, if you need professional writing help for any part of the research, you can scout here online for the best research paper writing service.

There are several expert writers on ENL hosted on our website that you can consider for a fast response on your research study at a cheap price.

As students, you may be unable to cover every part of your research on your own. This inability is the reason you should consider expert writers for custom research topics in Linguistics approved by your professor for high grades.

130+ Original Linguistics Research Topics: Ideas To Focus On

Linguistics is an exciting course to learn. Unfortunately, writing a research paper or essay or write my thesis in linguistics is not as easy. Many students struggle to find a good research topic to write about. Finding a good research topic is crucial because it is the foundation of your paper. It will guide your research and dictate what you write.

Creative Language Research Topics

Argumentative research titles about language, english language research topics for stem students, social media research topics about language, the best quantitative research topics about language, more creative sociolinguistics research topics, research topics in english language education for students, top thesis topics in language, creative language and gender research topics, language education research topics on social issues, research title about language acquisition.

Most students turn to the internet to find research paper topics. Sadly, most sources provide unoriginal and basic topics. For this reason, this article provides some creative sample research topics for English majors.

Linguistics is a fascinating subject with so many research topic options. Check out the following creative research topics in language

How you can use linguistic patterns to locate migration paths
Computers and their effect on language creation
The internet and its impacts on modern language
Has text messages helped create a new linguistic culture?
Language and change; how social changes influence language development
How language changes over time
How effective is non-verbal communication in communicating emotions?
Verbal communication and emotional displays: what is the link?
The negative power of language in internet interactions
How words change as society develops
Is the evolution of languages a scientific concept?
Role of technology in linguistics

Argumentative essay topics should state your view on a subject so you can create content to defend the view and convince others that it is logical and well-researched. Here are some excellent language research titles examples

Society alters words and their meanings over time
Children have a better grasp of new language and speech than adults
Childhood is the perfect time to develop speech
Individuals can communicate without a shared language
Learning more than one language as a child can benefit individuals in adulthood
Elementary schools should teach students a second language
Language acquisition changes at different growth stages
The impact of technology on linguistics
Language has significant power to capitalize on emotions
The proper use of language can have positive impacts on society

Research topics for STEM students do not differ much from those for college and high school students. However, they are slightly more targeted. Find an excellent research title about language for your paper below:

How does language promote gender differences?
Music and language evolution: the correlation
Slang: development and evolution in different cultures
Can language create bonds among cross-cultural societies?
Formal vs informal language: what are the differences?
Age and pronunciation: what is the correlation?
How languages vary across STEM subjects
Are STEM students less proficient in languages?
The use of language in the legal sector
The importance of non-verbal communication and body language
How politeness is perceived through language choices and use
The evolution of English through history

Did you know you can find excellent social media research topics if you do it right? Check out the following social media language research titles:

The role of the internet in promoting language acquisition
A look at changes in languages since social media gained traction
How social media brings new language
How effective are language apps in teaching foreign languages?
The popularity of language applications among learners
A study of the impact of the internet on the spreading of slang
Social media as a tool for promoting hate language
Free speech vs hate speech: what is the difference?
How social media platforms can combat hate language propagation
How can social media users express emotions through written language?
Political censorship and its impact on the linguistics applied in the media
The differences between social media and real-life languages

A language research title can be the foundation of your quantitative research. Find some of the best examples of research topics for English majors here:

Language barriers in the healthcare sector
What percentage of kids below five struggle with languages?
Understanding the increase in multilingual people
Language barriers and their impact on effective communication
Social media and language: are language barriers existent in social media?
Bilingualism affects people’s personalities and temperaments
Can non-native teachers effectively teach local students the English language?
Bilingualism and its impact on social perceptions
The new generative grammar concept: an in-depth analysis
Racist language: its history and impacts
A look into examples of endangered languages
Attitudes toward a language and how it can impact language acquisition

You can choose a research topic about language based on social issues, science concerns like biochemistry topics , and much more. Sociolinguistics is the study of the correlation between language and society and the application of language in various social situations. Here are some excellent research topics in sociolinguistics:

An analysis of how sociolinguistics can help people understand multi-lingual language choices
An analysis of sociolinguistics through America’s color and race background
The role of sociolinguistics in children development
Comparing sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics and gender empowerment: an analysis of their correlation
How media houses use sociolinguistics to create bias and gain a competitive advantage
The value of sociolinguistics education in the teaching of discipline
The role played by sociolinguistics in creating social change throughout history
Research methods used in sociolinguistics
Different sociolinguistics and their role in English evolution
Sociolinguistics: an in-depth analysis
What is sociolinguistics, and what is its role in language evolution?

A good research topic in English will serve as the guiding point for your research paper. Find a suitable research topic for English majors below:

Types of indigenous languages
Language s an essential element of human life
Language as the primary communication medium
The value of language in society
The negative side of coded language
School curriculums and how they influence languages
Linguistics: a forensic language
Elements that influence people’s ability to learn a new language
The development of the English language
How the English language borrows from other languages
Multilingualism: an insight
The correlation between metaphors and similes

Many students struggle to find good thesis topics in language and linguistics. As you read more on the thesis statement about social media , make sure you also understand every thesis title about language from the following examples:

The classification of human languages
The application of different tools in language identification
The role of linguists in language identification
The contributions of Greek philosophers to language development
The origin of language: early speculations
The history of language through the scope of mythology
Theories that explain the origin and development of language
Is language the most effective form of communication
The impact of brain injuries on language
Language impacts on sports
Linguistics intervention that won’t work in this century
Language as a system of symbols

Just like economic research paper topics , gender and language topics do not have to stick to the norms or the standards by which all students write. You can exercise some creativity when creating your topic. Discover a topic about language and gender from this list:

Language and gender: what is the correlation?
How different genders perceive language
Does a kid’s gender influence their grasp of languages?
Men vs Women: a statistical overview of their multilingual prowess.
The perception of language from the female standpoint
The difference between female and male language use
The use of language as a tool for connection between females and males
Does gender have an impact on efficient communication
Does gender impact word choices in conversations?
Females have an easier time learning two or more languages
What makes female and male language choices differ?
Are females better at communicating using spoken language?

There are many social issues related to language education that you can cover in your research paper. Check out the following topics about language related to social issues research topics for your research:

Language translation: what makes it possible
How does the mother tongue influence pronunciation?
Issues that encourage people to learn different languages
Sign language: origin and more
Role of language in solving conflicts
Language and mental health: a vivid analysis
The similarities between English and French languages
Language disorders: an overview
Common barriers to language acquisition
The impact of mother tongue on effective communication
Reasons you should learn two or more languages
The benefits of multilingualism in the corporate world
Language and identity: what is the correlation?

Language acquisition is the process by which people gain the ability to understand and produce language. Like anatomy research paper topics , language acquisition is a great area to focus your linguistics research. Here are some research questions that bring the focus of the study of linguistic and language acquisition:

Language acquisition: an overview
What attitudes do people have about language acquisition
How attitude can impact language acquisition
The evolution of language acquisition over time
Language and ethnicity: their correlation
Do native English speakers have an easier time acquiring new languages?
A case study on political language
Why is language acquisition a key factor in leadership
Language acquisition and mother tongue pronunciation: the link
Ambiguity as a barrier to language acquisition
How words acquire their meanings

While a good topic can help capture the reader and create a good impression, it is insufficient to earn you excellent grades. You also need quality content for your paper to get perfect grades. However, creating a high-quality research paper takes time, effort, and skill, which most students do not have.

For these reasons, we offer quality research paper writing services for all students. We guarantee quality papers, timely deliveries, and originality. Reach out to our writers for top linguistics research papers today!

55 Top-Rated Research Topics in Linguistics For an A+

The field of linguistics is one of the easiest yet challenging subjects for college and university students. Areas such as phonology, phonetics, syntax, morphology, and semantics in linguistics can keep you up all night.

That is why we came up with these quality language research topics.

What are the Linguistics Research Topics?

To understand this better, we’d have first to define the term linguistics.

Language in context ,
Language form, and
Language meaning.

The researcher will have to determine the interplay between sound and meaning when presented with this subject. A linguistics research paper will, therefore, deal with the following:

The nature of language
How human languages are classified
Tools used in language identification

Language entices researchers as it draws significant and sustained attention with the reader. With the numerous languages in the world now, you cannot miss finding an area or two to write on this topic.

However, we endeavor to make this task quick and easy for you by shooting up 55 research topics in linguistics.

How To Write Linguistic Topics For Your Dissertation

Are you having trouble coming up with a research topic for your research paper? Here are the top expert recommendations:

Brainstorm ideas on your own and with your friends
Pick a broad topic and free-write specific sub-topics on it
Get inspiration from other available linguistics research paper topics

After coming up with a topic that interests you, check to ensure that it meets your assignment criteria.

So let’s get started!

History of Language Research Topics

The contribution of Greek philosophers to language
Significance of the over 30,000 preserved cuneiform writings to language
Early speculations about the origin of language
The long history of language as rooted in mythology
Why the origin of language is an unanswerable problem
A critical analysis of theories that explain the origin and development of language

Argumentative College Linguistic Research Topics

Is language the only way we can use to communicate?
Does a brain injury have an impact on language?
Should we refer to the language as a mere system of symbols?
Do language disorders make it a difficult subject to study?
Does the mother tongue have an impact on efficient communication?
Should we learn two or more languages?

Linguistics Research Topics – Tough Questions

Why is there a similarity among many English and French words?
What makes people speak different languages?
Why does the mother tongue always interfere with one’s pronunciation?
What makes it possible for language translation?
Is sign language only a matter of making signs with the hands?
Why are some languages difficult to learn than others?

Sociolinguistic Research Topics

Social factors that necessitate language variation and varieties
What are the attitudes to language among different societies?
The relationship between language and identity
A critical evaluation of language and ethnicity
Analyzing language attrition among most English speakers
Distinct functions of language among different communities

Interesting Topics in Linguistics

Salient factors that contribute to language shift and death
Why nobody can claim to know a certain language in its entirety
Why is written communication more precise than spoken one?
Problems of ambiguity during language translation
Does language influence society, or vice versa, is it true?
The effectiveness of language support and subject teaching

Linguistics Paper Topics on Politics

Persuasive language strategies and techniques in political speeches
Why politicians use culturally used languages when addressing indigenous communities?
The place of colonial rule in African politics
A case study of effective political communication
Understanding the changing landscape of political communication
The use of buzz words and tag lines in political speeches

Linguistics Research Paper Topics on Semantics

How does meaning work in language analysis and interpretation?
How can the meanings of words relate to each other?
Ways in which sentences are related to one another
What causes ambiguity to arise in language?
How do different speakers acquire a sense of meaning?
A critical analysis of language use and language acquisition

Linguistic Topics on Translation

The role of the latest technologies in the translation industry
Is the translator training and pedagogy producing efficient translators?
Are translations the cause of misunderstanding between different languages?
What is the effectiveness of audiovisual translation?
Is literary translation causing more harm than good in communication?
What is the relationship between translation and popular culture?

Interesting Linguistics Topics on Language Disorders

Causes of receptive language disorders among children
Mental formation of language disorders during a child’s development
Symptoms of language disorder and how to deal with them
What is the effectiveness of psychotherapy in dealing with language disorders?
Why is autism spectrum disorder common among most children?
What causes problems with the sentence and word flow?
Why children of 1 and 2 years of age have trouble with p, b, m, h, and w sounds

For top grades, aim for a specific and original linguistic topic. If the task seems daunting and tedious to you, then professional thesis writing help is all you need. The service is available at cheap rates with guaranteed top quality.

Have a professional complete your linguistics research paper today!

Make PhD experience your own

Language and linguistics articles from across Nature Portfolio

Latest research and reviews.

Research on flipped classrooms in foreign language teaching in Chinese higher education

Quanjiang Guo

Analysing and evaluating the bilingual adaptation of English graded readers in China: A social semiotic multimodal discourse study

Kunkun Zhang

Does simplification hold true for machine translations? A corpus-based analysis of lexical diversity in text varieties across genres

Subtitling saudi arabic slang into english: the case of “the book of the sun” on netflix.

Sukayna Ali
Hanan Al-Jabri
Wan Rose Eliza Abdul Rahman

ChatGPT and the digitisation of writing

Translation, transmission and indigenization of Christianity in nineteenth-century China: south-to-north travel of the disguised San Zi Jing by Medhurst

News and Comment

Time to revise the terminology we use to regulate water management practices.

Paul Jeffrey
Heather Smith
Francis Hassard

Is boredom a source of noise and/or a confound in behavioral science research?

Behavioral researchers tend to study behavior in highly controlled laboratory settings to minimize the effects of potential confounders. Yet, while doing so, the artificial setup itself might unintentionally introduce noise or confounders, such as boredom. In this perspective, we draw upon theoretical and empirical evidence to make the case that (a) some experimental setups are likely to induce boredom in participants, (b) the degree of boredom induced might differ between individuals as a function of differences in trait boredom, (c) boredom can impair participants’ attention, can make study participation more effortful, and can increase the urge to do something else (i.e., to disengage from the study). Most importantly, we argue that some participants might adjust their behavior because they are bored. Considering boredom’s potential for adding noise to data, or for being an unwanted confound, we discuss a set of recommendations on how to control for and deal with the occurrence and effects of boredom in behavioral science research.

Maria Meier
Corinna S. Martarelli
Wanja Wolff

Exploration of the social and philosophical underpinning of ‘the patient’—what this means for people with a long-term condition

Should healthcare professionals use the term ‘patient’? A patient is a social construct, in a biomedical model, in which each actor has their role to play. This model has been criticised as belonging to an era of medical hegemony and (mis)represents an individual seeking healthcare as one who is simply a passive participant and recipient of care. The ‘Language Matters’ campaign, for people living with diabetes, has sought to address the role of language in interactions between healthcare providers. A key point raised in the campaign is whether someone who feels well, but has ongoing healthcare input, should be referred to as a patient? In this article, we address the concept of a patient and how its use can belie a particular mindset (or ‘discourse’) in which power is established in a relationship and can lead to individuals being defined by their condition. However, for some linguistic communities (such as nurses and doctors), a patient may be considered less as one over whom they have dominion, but rather someone for whom they have specific responsibilities and duty of care. Drawing upon the philosophical theories of language—that the meaning and inference of a word is dependent on its use—we argue that the context in which use of the term patient occurs is crucial. Without more fundamental cultural disruption of the biomedical model, word substitution, in itself, will not change perception.

M. B. Whyte

Approaching the neuroscience of language

Marika Gobbo

Neural evidence of word prediction

Jane Aristia

The usefulness of ChatGPT for psychotherapists and patients

ChatGPT is a chatbot based on a large language model. Its application possibilities are extensive, and it is freely accessible to all people, including psychotherapists and individuals with mental illnesses. Some blog posts about the possible use of ChatGPT as a psychotherapist or as a supplement to psychotherapy already exist. Based on three detailed chats, the author analyzed the chatbot’s responses to psychotherapists seeking assistance, to patients looking for support between psychotherapy sessions, during their psychotherapists’ vacations, and to people suffering from mental illnesses who are not yet in psychotherapy. The results suggest that ChatGPT offers an interesting complement to psychotherapy and an easily accessible, good (and currently free) place to go for people with mental-health problems who have not yet sought professional help and have no psychotherapeutic experience. The information is, however, one-sided, and in any future regulation of AI it must also be made clear that the proposals are not only insufficient as a psychotherapy substitute, but also have a bias that favors certain methods while not even mentioning other approaches that may be more helpful for some people.

Paolo Raile

Quick links

Explore articles by subject
Guide to authors
Editorial policies

Applied Linguistics Research: Current Issues, Methods, and Trends

Cite this chapter.

Aek Phakiti 5 ,
Peter De Costa 6 ,
Luke Plonsky 7 &
Sue Starfield 8

8916 Accesses

6 Citations

1 Altmetric

This chapter provides a broad contextualisation of the Handbook , locating its focus within current debates and concerns of relevance to the field of applied linguistics. The editors highlight the field’s growing interest in research methodology and offer a rationale for the selection of topics and issues in the Handbook, such as methodological reform, transparency, transdisciplinarity, and the impact of technology.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Available as PDF
Read on any device
Instant download
Own it forever
Available as EPUB and PDF
Compact, lightweight edition
Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
Free shipping worldwide - see info
Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Brown, J. D. (2014). Mixed methods research for TESOL . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Google Scholar

Brown, J. D. (2015). Why bother learning advanced quantitative methods in L2 research. In L. Plonsky (Ed.), Advancing quantitative methods in second language research (pp. 9–20). New York, NY: Routledge.

Chapter Google Scholar

Brown, J. D., & Rogers, T. S. (2002). Doing second language research . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Byrnes, H. (2011). Perspectives. Modern Language Journal, 95 , 628–653.

Article Google Scholar

Byrnes, H. (2013). Notes from the editor. Modern Language Journal, 97 , 825–827.

Cook, G. (2003). Applied linguistics . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cook, G. (2015). Birds out of dinosaurs: The death and life of applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 36 , 425–433.

Crossley, S. A., Kyle, K., & McNamara, D. S. (2016). The development and use of cohesive devices in L2 writing and their relations to judgments of essay quality. Journal of Second Language Writing, 32 , 1–16.

Cunnings, I., & Finlayson, I. (2015). Mixed effects modelling and longitudinal data analysis. In L. Plonsky (Ed.), Advancing quantitative methods in second language research (pp. 159–181). New York, NY: Routledge.

Davies, A., & Elder, C. (Eds.). (2004). Handbook of applied linguistics . London: Blackwell.

de Bot, K. (2015). A history of applied linguistics: From 1980 to the present . London and New York: Routledge.

De Costa, P. I. (Ed.). (2016). Ethics in applied linguistics research: Language researcher narratives . New York: Routledge.

De Costa, P. I., Rawal, H., & Zaykovskaya, I. (2017). Study abroad in contemporary times: Toward greater methodological diversity and innovation. Special issue of System, 71 .

Dörnyei, Z. (2007). Research methods in applied linguistics: Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodologies . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Duff, P. (2008). Case study research in applied linguistics . New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Fulcher, G., & Davidson, F. (Eds.). (2012). The Routledge handbook of language testing . London and New York: Routledge.

Gass, S. (2009). A historical survey of SLA research. In T. K. Bhatia & W. C. Ritchie (Eds.), The new handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 3–27). Bingley: Emerald.

Gass, S. M., & Mackey, A. (Eds.). (2012). The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition . London and New York: Routledge.

Graesser, A. C., McNamara, D. S., Louwerse, M. M., & Cai, Z. (2004). Coh-Metrix: Analysis of text on cohesion and language. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36 (2), 193–202. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195564

Hall, C. J., Smith, P. H., & Wicaksono, R. (2011). Mapping applied linguistics: A guide for students and practitioners . London: Routledge.

Heller, M., Pietikäinen, S., & Pujolar, J. (2018). Critical sociolinguistic research methods: Studying language issues that matter . New York: Routledge.

Holliday, A. (2016). Doing and writing qualitative research (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Ivankova, N. V., & Greer, J. L. (2015). Mixed methods research and analysis. In B. Paltridge & A. Phakiti (Eds.), Research methods in applied linguistics: A practical resource (pp. 63–81). London: Bloomsbury.

Kaplan, R. (Ed.). (2010). The Oxford handbook of applied linguistics (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

King, K. A., & Mackey, A. (2016). Research methodology in second language studies: Trends, concerns, and new directions. Modern Language Journal, 100 , 209–227.

Linck, J., & Cunnings, I. (2015). The utility and application of mixed-effects models in second language research. Language Learning, 65 (S1), 185–207.

Liu, Q., & Brown, D. (2015). Methodological synthesis of research on the effectiveness of corrective feedback in L2 writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 30 , 66–81.

Mackey, A. (Ed.). (2007). Conversational interaction in second language acquisition: A collection of empirical studies . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mackey, A., & Gass, S. M. (2012). Second language research: Methodology and design (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Mahboob, A., & Knight, N. K. (Eds.). (2010). Appliable linguistics . London: Continuum.

Mahboob, A., Paltridge, B., Phakiti, A., Wagner, E., Starfield, S., Burns, A., … De Costa, P. I. (2016). TESOL quarterly research guidelines. TESOL Quarterly, 50 , 42–65.

Marsden, E., Mackey, A., & Plonsky, L. (2016). Breadth and depth: The IRIS repository. In A. Mackey & E. Marsden (Eds.), Advancing methodology and practice: The IRIS repository of instruments for research into second languages (pp. 1–21). New York, NY: Routledge.

Marsden, E. J., Morgan-Short, K., Thompson, S., & Abugaber, D. (in press). Replication in second language research: Narrative and systematic reviews, and recommendations for the field. Language Learning, 68 (2).

Marsden, E., Thompson, S., & Plonsky, L. (in press). A methodological synthesis of self-paced reading in second language research. Applied Psycholinguistics .

Mckay, S. L. (2006). Researching second language classrooms . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

McKinley, J., & Rose, H. (Eds.). (2017). Doing research in applied linguistics: Realities, dilemmas and solutions . London and New York: Routledge.

Moeller, A. J., Creswell, J. W., & Saville, N. (Eds.). (2015). Language assessment and mixed methods . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Norouzian, R., de Miranda, M. A., & Plonsky, L. (in press). The Bayesian revolution in L2 research: An applied approach. Language Learning .

Norris, J. M., Plonsky, L., Ross, S. J., & Schoonen, R. (2015). Guidelines for reporting quantitative methods and results in primary research. Language Learning, 65 , 470–476.

Norton, B., & De Costa, P. I. (2018). Research tasks on identity and language education. Language Teaching, 51 , 90–112.

Nunan, D., & Bailey, K. (2009). Exploring second language classroom research: A comprehensive guide . Boston: Heinle Cengage Learning.

Ortega, L. (2015). Research synthesis. In B. Paltridge & A. Phakiti (Eds.), Research methods in applied linguistics: A practical resource (pp. 225–244). London: Bloomsbury.

Paltridge, B., & Phakiti, A. (Eds.). (2010). Continuum companion to research methods in applied linguistics . London: Continuum.

Paltridge, B., & Phakiti, A. (2015a). Developing a research project. In B. Paltridge & A. Phakiti (Eds.), Research methods in applied linguistics: A practical resource (pp. 260–278). London: Bloomsbury.

Paltridge, B., & Phakiti, A. (Eds.). (2015b). Research methods in applied linguistics: A practical resource . London: Bloomsbury.

Paquot, M., & Plonsky, L. (2017). Quantitative research methods and study quality in learner corpus research. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, 3 , 61–94.

Pawlak, M., & Aronin, L. (2014). Essential topics in applied linguistics and multilingualism: Studies in honor of David Singleton . New York: Springer.

Book Google Scholar

Perry, F. L. (2012). Research in applied linguistics: Becoming a discerning consumer (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Phakiti, A. (2014). Experimental research methods in language learning . London: Bloomsbury.

Phakiti, A., & Paltridge, B. (2015). Approaches and methods in applied linguistics research. In B. Paltridge & A. Phakiti (Eds.), Research methods in applied linguistics: A practical resource (pp. 5–25). London: Bloomsbury.

Plonsky, L. (2013). Study quality in SLA: An assessment of designs, analyses, and reporting practices in quantitative L2 research. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35 , 655–687.

Plonsky, L. (2014). Study quality in quantitative L2 research (1990–2010): A methodological synthesis and call for reform. Modern Language Journal, 98 , 450–470.

Plonsky, L., Egbert, J., & LaFlair, G. T. (2015). Bootstrapping in applied linguistics: Assessing its potential using shared data. Applied Linguistics, 36 , 591–610.

Plonsky, L., & Gass, S. (2011). Quantitative research methods, study quality, and outcomes: The case of interaction research. Language Learning, 61 , 325–366.

Plonsky, L, & Ghanbar, H. (in press). Multiple regression in L2 research: A methodological synthesis and meta-analysis of R 2 values . Manuscript under review.

Plonsky, L., & Oswald, F. L. (2015). Meta-analyzing second language research. In L. Plonsky (Ed.), Advancing quantitative methods in second language research (pp. 106–128). New York, NY: Routledge.

Plonsky, L., & Oswald, F. L. (2017). Multiple regression as a flexible alternative to ANOVA in L2 research. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 39 , 579–592.

Richards, K., Ross, S., & Seedhouse, P. (2012). Research methods for applied language studies: An advanced resource book for students . New York and London: Routledge.

Schmitt, N. (2002). An introduction to applied linguistics . London: Arnold.

Simpson, J. (Ed.). (2011). The Routledge handbook of applied linguistics . New York: Routledge.

Starfield, S. (2015). Ethnographic research. In B. Paltridge & A. Phakiti (Eds.), Research methods in applied linguistics: A practical resource (pp. 137–152). London: Bloomsbury.

Sterling, S., & Gass, S. (2017). Exploring the boundaries of research ethics: Perceptions of ethics and ethical behaviors in applied linguistics research. System, 70 , 50–62.

Tao, J., Shao, G., & Gao, X. (2017). Ethics-related practices in internet-based applied linguistics research. Applied Linguistics Review, 8 , 321–354.

Ziegler, N. (2016). Methodological practices in interaction in synchronous computer mediated communication: A synthetic approach. In A. Mackey & E. Marsden (Eds.), Instruments for research into second languages: Empirical studies advancing methodology (pp. 197–223). New York, NY: Routledge.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Sydney School of Education and Social Work, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Aek Phakiti

Department of Linguistics and Languages, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

Peter De Costa

Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

Luke Plonsky

School of Education, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Sue Starfield

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aek Phakiti .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Sydney School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Department of Linguistics, Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

Applied Linguistics, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

Copyright information

About this chapter

Phakiti, A., De Costa, P., Plonsky, L., Starfield, S. (2018). Applied Linguistics Research: Current Issues, Methods, and Trends. In: Phakiti, A., De Costa, P., Plonsky, L., Starfield, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Linguistics Research Methodology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59900-1_1

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59900-1_1

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, London

Print ISBN : 978-1-137-59899-8

Online ISBN : 978-1-137-59900-1

eBook Packages : Social Sciences Social Sciences (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Find a journal
Track your research

100+ Compelling Linguistics Research Topics for University Students

Confused while selecting the interesting linguistics research topics to pen down your thoughts on a piece of paper? So, bounce back to this article and pick the best linguistics research paper topics and boost your grades.

Un-layering the essence of teaching-learning methodology demonstrates the development of linguistic theories. Linguistics is a science of language in which fact-finding is done through some rational and systematic study. While digging into the information about the history of linguistics, two perspectives on languages are unveiled: prescriptive and descriptive views.

The linguistic analysis uncovers the following areas: phonetics, phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. Furthermore, the scrutinization of linguistics helps you to know about every aspect of languages as well as methods for studying them.

Table of Contents

How To Choose the Right Linguistics Research Topics?

Stress work is the indication of degraded academic performance and lower grades even if we talk about a linguistics research paper. Make your every endeavor effective and energetic by applying the right strategy. Therefore, make the right selection for your academic writing that starts from the interesting topic selection in linguistics.

Moreover, take advantage of research paper help and discuss your concerns with professional writers. As a suggestion, you can choose the right linguistics research topics by keeping the following points in your mind:

Find your interest: Linguistics uncover various aspects of language learning and allow you to expand your mind capabilities. So, try to explore the depth of the subject and find your area of interest. It will make your academic writing more interesting and enthralling.

Brainstorm the ideas: Picking the interesting linguistics topics demands your knowledge and expertise. Therefore, you need to take the advantage of brainstorming and collect various ideas to explore the concept of linguistics.

Perform pensive research : When you are keen to score high marks, you need to have sufficient knowledge. Conduct insightful research and uncover the pensive ideas for your research paper topics in linguistics.

Interesting Topics in Linguistics

Linguistics is the foundation of language knowledge. Linguistics theories indeed are interrelated to learning the English language. When you have to boost your grades, your selection for linguistics research paper topics makes a huge difference. Some of the interesting linguistics research topics are:

Explain the significance of music in the evolution of language.
Does age really impact English pronunciation?
What is the role of sociolinguistics education in creating discipline?
What is the significance of language in creating teaching methodology?
Analysis of verbal and written communication based on language usage.
Is it important to have expertise in several languages?
Explain the issues related to receptive language disorder and its impact on brain development.
How do you correlate sentence-making and word flow in linguistics?
Discuss the comparability between English and French languages.
Factors responsible for different spoken languages.
The impact of slang in the development of languages.
Is text messaging creating a revolutionary subculture in the new linguistic scenario?
How are linguistic patterns helpful in locating migration roadways?
What are factors affecting the capability of learning a language?
Explain the role of language in building a national identity for developing a multicultural society.
Digital Revolution: impact of computers in modern language
A systematic review on vowel pronunciation in the American Schools.
Significance of language in creating cross-cultural communities: A comprehensive review
Elucidate the impact of language on one’s perception.
Textual and Linguistic analysis for housing studies.

Stimulating Research Paper Topics In Sociolinguistics

While seeking linguistics research topics for your assignments or research paper, you may find sociolinguistics interesting to explore. Sociolinguistics demonstrates the impact of language on our society. When you are keen to explore the effect of language in different aspects of society (including cultural values and expectations), you need to do an in-depth analysis of sociolinguistics.

For building a good foundation on sociolinguistics, you can select the following linguistics paper topics:

How would you define linguistic practices in specific communities?
An elaborative approach for code-switching and code-mixing
Explain the impact of dialect on gender.
A correlational study to share the relationship between language, social class, and cognition.
In-depth study of interactional sociolinguistics in the 21st Century.
A comprehensive analysis on accountability and aptness of dialect.
Evaluate the education of language in the U.S.
The role of languages in controlling emotions.
Effectiveness of verbal communication in expressing one’s feelings: A competitive analysis.
A literature review on communication with a precise comparison of verbal and non-verbal communication
Difference between advanced placement (AP) English literature and language.
What is the relationship between language and one’s personality?
A critical analysis on the relation of language and ethnicity.
Describe the attitudes to various languages among societies.
A comprehensive approach on dialect variations in American English-speaking people.
Scrutinize linguistic variation on language loyalty.
Develop a good understanding of sociological variations to languages.
Impact of the generation gap on language usage.
Examine the impact of various factors (social tension, media, racism, and entertainment) on the utilization of languages.
Is there a difference between linguistic practices among men and women?

Also, Read: 150+ Business Research Topics

Interesting Research Topics in Applied Linguistics

Are you looking for linguistics research topics to advance your learning abilities? In such a case, you have to learn about “Applied Linguistics.” It is the branch of linguistics in which one can understand the practical applications of language studies such as speech therapy, language teaching, and more.

In other words, applied linguistics offers solutions to deal with language-related real-life problems. Imperative academic areas where you can find the applications of applied linguistics are psychology, education, sociology, communication research, and anthropology. Some applied linguistics research paper topics:

Discuss the expansion of learning a second language through reading.
Share your learning on the critical period hypothesis for the acquisition of the second language.
Impact of bilingualism on an individual’s personality.
Linguistics evaluation on the difference between written and spoken language.
Describe language cognition and perceptions in a learning process.
Impact of language barriers on healthcare delivery.
Detailed analysis on various methodologies to learn applied linguistics.
Discuss the relationship between empathy and language proficiency in learners of adult language.
Detailed analysis on multilingualism and multiculturalism.
Impact of extended instructions on the use of passive voices, modals, and relative clauses: A critical analysis.
Explain digitally-mediated collaborative writing for ESL students.
How do we evaluate self-efficacy in students who speak low-level English language?
Elucidate the significance of phrasal verbs in creating technical documents.
Expectations of American Students while taking Japanese language classes.
A detailed study on American deaf students in English as a Non-Native Language (ENNL) classes.
How do you understand by modeling music with Grammars?
The cognitive development of expertise as an ESL teacher: An insightful analysis.
Sound Effects: Gender, Age, and Sound symbolism in American English.
Importance of applied linguistics in today’s digital world.

Also, Read: Modern Literature

Interesting Research Topics in Semantics

The study of reference, meaning, and the truth is covered under semantics or semiotics, or semasiology. A comprehensive analysis of semantics reflects the essence of compositional semantics and lexical semantics. The combination of words and their interaction to form larger experiences like sentences comes under compositional semantics. Whereas, the notion of words is shared under lexical semantics.

Some academic disciplines in linguistic semantics are conceptual semantics, cognitive semantics, formal semantics, computational semantics, and more. Linguistic research paper topics on Semantics are as follows:

Examine meaning work in language interpretation and scrutinization
A critical evaluation of language acquisition and language use.
Challenges in the study of semantic and pragmatic theory.
Discuss semantics lessons and paragraph structure in written language.
How do you explain the semantic richness effects in the recognition of visual words?
How richness of semantics affects the processing of a language.
Semantic generation to action-related stimuli: A neuroanatomical evaluation of embodied cognition.
Examine the understanding of blind children for reading phonological and tactual coding in Braille.
Explain a semantic typology of gradable predicates.
A comparison of between blind and sighted children’s memory performance: the reverse-generation effect.
Clinical research for designing medical decision support systems.
Discuss word recognition processes in blind and sighted children.
A corpus-based study on argumentative indicators.
The typology of modality in modern West Iranian languages.
A critical analysis on changes in naming and semantic abilities in different age groups.
Explain the multidimensional semantics of evaluative adverbs.
A comprehensive analysis on procedural meaning: problems and perspectives.
Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspectives on figurative language.
Elucidate semantic and pragmatic problems in discourse and dialogue.

Topics For Linguistics Essays

A curiosity of exploring the various concepts in linguistics leads you to work on essays. Projecting your thoughts in writing linguistics essays makes you understand the structure and changes in human languages. In a case, if you are searching for the best topics in linguistics, go through the following list of linguistics essays:

Difference between human language and artificial language.
Classification of writing systems based on various stages of development.
The laws of language development
Culture and language: impact on reflections.
Methodology of reading and writing for children by Albert James.
Significance of phoneme and phonological matters
The complexity of human language: the specific cases of the apes
Explain the development of languages and derivational morphology.
Detailed analysis on language extinction.
Investigate the peculiarities of English-Chinese and Chinese-English translations.
A comprehensive overview on the acquisition of English as a second language by Mid-Eastern students.
Discuss semiology in language analysis.
Impact of blogging on learning languages.
Linguistics: grammar and language teaching.
English Language: Explain its standard and non-standard types.
Discuss speech community as linguistic anthropology.
A systematic review on linguistic diversity in modern culture.
Similarities and differences between language and logic.
What is the impact of language on digital communication?
Listening comprehension: a comparative analysis of the articles.

Computational Linguistics Research Topics

Analysis and synthesis of language and speech using the techniques of computer science share the significance of computational linguistics. This branch of linguistics reflects the study of computational modeling of natural language. It also describes the computational approaches to answering the linguistic questions.

Under computational linguistics, you can explore different concepts such as artificial intelligence, mathematics, computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, anthropology. More interesting computational linguistics research topics are:

Explain the factors measuring the performance of speech recognition.
Discuss word sense disambiguation.
Detailed analysis on dependency parsing based on graphs and transitions.
A multidimensional analysis on linguistic dimensions
Analyze Medieval German poetry through supervised learning.
Extraction of Danish verbs.
Analysis of Schizophrenia text dataset.
An intra-lingual contrastive corpus analysis based on computational linguistics.
Discuss various methods to introduce, create, and conclude a text.

Still, Confused? Select The Compelling Linguistics Research Topics With Our Writers!

Are you still stressed about picking the right linguistics research paper topic? Without striking the right ideas to your mind, you find it hard to initiate your research work. But, don’t take tension anymore. Our professional and Ph.D. writers will help you to make the appropriate selection for linguistics assignments. Grab our online paper help and receive customized solutions for your research papers.

By Alex Brown

I'm an ambitious, seasoned, and versatile author. I am experienced in proposing, outlining, and writing engaging assignments. Developing contagious academic work is always my top priority. I have a keen eye for detail and diligence in producing exceptional academic writing work. I work hard daily to help students with their assignments and projects. Experimenting with creative writing styles while maintaining a solid and informative voice is what I enjoy the most.

100+ Linguistic Topics for Excellent Research Papers

13 December, 2021

12 minutes read

Author: Donna Moores

Linguistics is an English language category that deals with logical dialectal analysis and interpretation. It seeks to reveal the form, meaning, and context of language. While most college students may perceive linguistics as a simple subject, it is pretty complex. English tutors might issue topics in linguistics in various disciplines like phonology or semantics, which leaves many learners grappling to tackle the research papers.

When analyzing language, you should write a paper that clarifies the nature, classification, and proper identification tools. Therefore, your linguistics topics must be relevant and within the research purpose. It is essential to pick an appropriate topic to allow the audience to understand the fundamental research.

With numerous dialects across the globe, identifying a worthy topic should be a simple task. We have compiled lists of engaging topic ideas to help you craft an outstanding research paper and inspire your academic projects.

Linguistics Research Paper: Definition, Explanation, Examples

Any linguistics paper should comprise an in-depth analysis of language development and acquisition. The subject explores various aspects of different dialects and their meanings. It also covers style and form to develop comprehensive arguments under various contexts.

That is why English professors test students with various academic projects to measure their comprehension levels. Thus, learners should ensure they select good linguistics research paper topics. Here is an overview example of the paper structure.

Introduction

Background information.
Hypothesis.
Literature review.

Methodology

Data sources.
Data organization.
Analysis/Findings.
Paraphrase hypothesis.
Significance of the study.
Recommendations.

Therefore, ensure your paper meets the specified academic standards. You must read the requirements keenly to craft an outstanding paper that meets the tutor’s expectations. If you encounter challenges, you can research further online or seek clarification from your professor to know how you will approach the research question.

Choosing A Good Linguistic Topic Isn’t Hard – Here’s How To Do It

Struggling to pick a relevant topic for your research paper? Fret not. We will help you understand the steps to identify an appropriate topic. Most students often underestimate the significance of the pre-writing stages, which entails topic selection. It is a vital phase where you need to choose relevant linguistics topics for your research paper. Hence, ensure you read the research question carefully to understand its requirements.

Carry out an extensive brainstorming session to identify relatable themes within the subject area. Avoid selecting a broad theme, but if you do, break it into minor sub-topics. This will help you during the research phase to get adequate information. Use different websites to get verifiable academic sources and published papers from reputable scholars.

Don’t forget to make your linguistics research paper topics catchy and exciting to capture your readers’ attention. No one wants to read a dull paper.

Finally, follow all the academic requirements for research paper writing – proper grammar, style, correct citation, etc. College tutors often award well-written, original papers.

However, if you still find it challenging to move beyond topic selection, you can reach out to one of our subject-oriented experts for assistance.

We are here to offer the following:

Quality-approved papers.
100% authentic papers.
One-on-one personalized learning.
Efficient support services.
Complete confidentiality and data privacy.

Therefore, do not endure the academic pressure alone. Talk to us we will help you select unique linguistic research topics.

15 Interesting Sociolinguistics Topic Ideas

Need help with your sociolinguistics research paper? Here are interesting topics in linguistics to jumpstart your writing.

An in-depth theoretical analysis of language development.
Explore dialect as a communication tool.
How brain injuries influence language and speech.
Language is a symbolic system: Discuss.
Examine the different linguistic disorders and challenges.
The impact of mother tongue on effective communication.
The importance of learning more than one dialect.
Evaluate mother tongue pronunciation and language fluency.
Compare and contrast the English and French languages.
Why do people communicate in different languages?
The role of Greek philosophers in language formation.
Language origination as an unfathomable issue.
Discuss language as a national identity in a multicultural nation.
Is there a difference between adult and child language acquisition?
Discuss the challenges in language development.

15 Good Applied Linguistics Topics

Applied linguistics is an essential discipline that allows learners to comprehend effective communication. Below are interesting linguistics topics to help you during writing.

What is applied linguistics?
Evaluate applied linguistics in a technological environment.
Discuss the intricacies of spoken and written language.
Explore bilingualism and multilingualism.
An analysis of communication barriers in delivering health services.
The influence of identity in a multicultural society.
Discuss dialect barriers in social media networks.
An in-depth analysis of hate speech.
The importance of applied linguistics development.
The adverse effects of social media on effective communication.
The impact of culture on multilingualism.
An in-depth evaluation of applied linguistics.
The influence of politics on linguistic media.
An analysis of practical research methods on linguistics.
How bilingualism enhances human personality.

15 Computational Linguistics Research Paper Topics

Computational linguistics involves technology in translation and other language-enhancing tools. Below are compelling linguistics thesis topics for your research compositions.

What is computational linguistics?
The impact of technology in speech recognition.
The evolution of the translation industry in enhancing communication.
Does translation cause communication barriers?
An analysis of audiovisual translation.
Discuss the effectiveness of supervised learning.
An analysis of effective programs for phonetic comparison of dialects.
Speech recognition: description of dialect performance.
An analysis of linguistic dimensions using technology.
Effective methods of text extraction.
Discuss the reasons for learning computational linguistics.
The influence of modern communication on computational linguistics.
Discuss the different approaches to effective learning.
An analysis of speech synthesis.
Discuss the benefits of machine translation.

15 Engaging Comparative Linguistics Research Paper Topics

Looking for winning research topics in linguistics? Search no more. Here are impressive comparative topic ideas for your research compositions:

Compare and contrast English and Latin.
A comparative study of speech physiology and anatomy.
An evaluation of the Ape language.
What is folk speech?
An analysis of historical linguistics.
An in-depth study of ethnographic semantics.
The connection between culture and linguistics.
A comparative analysis of phonetics in linguistics.
The influence of computers on dialect development.
Analyze communication in a paralinguistic dialect.
English popularity: A comparative study of the world.
Does accent fluency boost effective communication?
Neologism: An analysis of UK English.
Discuss the idioms of Australian English compared to American.
A comparative study of the Anglo-Saxon dialects.

15 Interesting Historical Linguistics Topic Ideas

Let us explore historical linguistics essay topics that will translate into remarkable papers with impressive literary arguments.

Discuss the significance of the Greek philosophers in language development.
An analysis of the preserved cuneiform writings.
Evaluate the origin of language theories.
Discuss the history of language in mythology.
An analysis of language translation.
A critical analysis of language development.
How speech impacts human interaction.
An analysis of modern communication evolution.
Discuss the history of written communication.
Analyze the different linguistics theories.
Why some dialects are challenging to learn.
What is structuralism in linguistics?
The effectiveness of mother tongue in linguistics.
The ancient relationship between French and English.
Is English considered indigenous?

15 Compelling Stylistics Linguistics Research Paper Topics

The following are interesting linguistics topics to help in crafting unique research papers. Peruse and pick one that suits your paper’s requirements.

Analyze the stylistic features of a business letter.
A comparative study of newspaper advertisement style.
An analysis of public speeches style
The forms and function of legal documents.
Discuss the functions of different newspaper genres.
The influence of ethnicity on linguistics.
Explore the effectiveness of spoken vs. written communication.
How effective is language translation?
Persuasive linguistics: An analysis of different strategies in politics.
The pros and cons of colonialism and the effects on African languages.
Discuss practical strategies for language acquisition.
Evaluate the social factors impacting language variation.
Discuss the various attitudes in society to language.
The impact of language on cultural identity.
The role of linguistics in different communities.

Having Problems with Your Paper? Our Experts Are Available 24/7

Research paper writing requires dedication in terms of time and effort. Most learners get stuck because of a lack of time and complex topics to handle. But with the correct strategy, you can simplify the entire composition. Let us look at some of the tips and tricks to help you compose an exceptional paper.

Read the essay prompt carefully

Take adequate time to acquaint yourself with the research prompt. What does your tutor expect from you? Read the assignment carefully before moving ahead with the research writing.

Choose a topic

Identify an appropriate topic through an extensive brainstorming exercise. It is pretty simple once you have the required themes in place.

Conduct comprehensive research

Carry out intense research on the topic you have selecting taking careful consideration about the relevant information. Use multiple trusted sources to extract adequate research content regarding the theme.

Develop a thesis

Organize your research and develop a powerful thesis statement. It gives your target audience an idea of the paper’s direction.

Design an outline

As per your paper requirements, design an appropriate outline that captures your entire research logically. Include an introduction, main body, and conclusion.

Writing process

Finally, start writing and make sure your arguments flow logically and clearly without any vague explanation in each paragraph.

Thorough editing and proofreading

Edit your work thoroughly and proofread for errors. Make sure it follows all the academic standard rules before turning in the paper to your tutor.

Need help with your research paper? Relax and let our qualified experts assist you in getting top-notch results. There is no need to struggle alone when our writers are available 24/7, ready to provide professional writing help. We have a team of skilled experts who are highly knowledgeable in diverse disciplines. Moreover, you will enjoy a personalized learning experience with our pro essay writers .

Whether you need help choosing linguistics anthropology research topics or composing the entire research paper, we have you covered in all aspects. No matter how complex the topic is, our experts will pull all-nighters to ensure you get your paper on time.

We are a reliable service that puts the interests of customers first. From having speedy client support to prompt deliveries, you can be sure of enjoying top-of-the-range services. We do not gamble with your academics, and that is why we promise our clients original research papers.

Therefore, contact us with detailed information about the writing service you need. Talk to us and improve your academic performance within no time.

A life lesson in Romeo and Juliet taught by death

Due to human nature, we draw conclusions only when life gives us a lesson since the experience of others is not so effective and powerful. Therefore, when analyzing and sorting out common problems we face, we may trace a parallel with well-known book characters or real historical figures. Moreover, we often compare our situations with […]

Ethical Research Paper Topics

Writing a research paper on ethics is not an easy task, especially if you do not possess excellent writing skills and do not like to contemplate controversial questions. But an ethics course is obligatory in all higher education institutions, and students have to look for a way out and be creative. When you find an […]

Art Research Paper Topics

Students obtaining degrees in fine art and art & design programs most commonly need to write a paper on art topics. However, this subject is becoming more popular in educational institutions for expanding students’ horizons. Thus, both groups of receivers of education: those who are into arts and those who only get acquainted with art […]

Custom Essay, Term Paper & Research paper writing services

testimonials

Toll Free: +1 (888) 354-4744

Email: [email protected]

Writing custom essays & research papers since 2008

Top 50+ linguistics research topics for your paper.

Are you a student or a graduate of linguistics? If yes, there is no doubting the fact that research topics in linguistics are your bread and butter. You can escape them in school. Write within the confines of the topics in linguistics and get your grade without stress. However, linguistics is a wide field and it can be hard to pick one of the many linguistic topics for your research. Sometimes, the problem is not in picking a topic. The problem is that despite the wide scope of linguistics, you don’t know how to form linguistics research topics.

We noticed these problems with students and decided to help. Our solution is to compile a list of 50 linguistic research topics for linguistics students. These topics could form the basis of your linguistics research paper topics. You don’t have to worry anymore about topics for master thesis in linguistics. We have you covered for all English linguistics research topics. Let’s dive in!

Check Our 50 Linguistics Research Topics

There are linguistics research topics in abundance. If you search online, you would find more than a few examples. However, you need to know the aspect of linguistics you want to use for your linguistics paper topics. It would make no sense to have a list of thesis topics in applied linguistics and want to write on topics in cognitive linguistics. While they are all under the broad body of linguistics, they are quite different from each other.

So, the first step in finding the perfect linguistics essay topics is to choose the aspect of linguistics you want. After you have made a choice you can now look into linguistics topics in that aspect. We have made finding interesting linguistics topics in any aspect you chose easier by grouping our 50 linguistics research topics. All you have to do is search under the aspect of your choice.

Interesting Linguistics Research Topics

If you don’t only want to write a research paper but you want to find every minute of it intriguing, these interesting topics in linguistics are the ones for you.

What makes written communication more precise compared to spoken communication?
How to spot language disorders and deal with them
What contributes to the prevalent language shift and death in our society today?
The language of feminism: How formalized is it and how does it affect society?
Why is it impossible to claim to know a language entirely?
What salient factors cause ambiguity in language translation?
An in-depth analysis of feminism in Africa
Language vs Society: Which one influences the other? How does it affect the members?
How effective are subject teaching and language support?
What factors affect language choice in multilingual societies? (Study of selected communities)
The real functions of language

Linguistics Topics on Translation

If you want the latest research topics in applied linguistics, the topics under the following subheadings would help you. You just have to look for the aspect that you have an interest in and look at linguistics in that light.

How has technology affected translation at this age and time?
Is translation the cause of misunderstandings between speakers of different languages?
How effective is an audiovisual translation in revolutionizing the translation industry?
Does literal translation do more harm than good?
How has the translator training and pedagogy faired in the production of efficient translators?
How does translation relate to popular culture?

Translation is essential in this century with people of different languages communicating and coming together in a global economy. These topics look into the issues that translation encounter at this time.

Linguistics Topics on Politics

Politics is an ever-present phenomenon in any society. These dissertation topics in linguistics examine the issues surrounding language in the field of politics. We have explained samples of Ph.D. thesis topics in linguistics in this field.

The reality of hate speech in selected communities
The use of persuasive language strategies and tools in political speech
How colonial rule affected African politics and language
Why do politicians use indigenous languages to address communities?
A critical analysis of the changing political communication landscape
Effective political communication: A case study of selected politicians
How tag lines and buzz words are used to enhance political speeches

Sociolinguistics Research Topics

This aspect of linguistics examines how issues surrounding how language works in society. These research topics for English linguistics focus on how people in society use language and its effects on society.

What are the social factors that necessitate language varieties?
How does language affect identity?
An in-depth analysis of language attrition common to most English speakers
A critical evaluation of the difference in attitudes towards language in different societies
The differences in language functions in selected communities
How ethnicity affect language and vice versa

Argumentative Linguistics Research Topics

These topics in linguistics for research papers argue on issues surrounding language. You can use these topics if you want to show different sides of an argument in your research.

Is language the best way to communicate?
Can we say that language is merely a system of symbols
Do language disorders cause difficulties in the study of language?
Does brain injury lead to issues in language capacities?
Do mother tongue inflection and accent impact efficient communication?
Is it advisable to learn more than one language?

Linguistics Research Topics on History

Language was not a concept that started a few years ago. People have been communicating for centuries and centuries. These topics look at the history of language, sometimes about this age.

How Greek philosophy contributes to language
What are the early speculations scientists had about the origin of language?
Analysis of the history of language as explained in mythology
How do the 3,000 preserved cuneiform writings affect language?
A critical evaluation of different theories on the origin and development of language
Why has the question of language origin remained unanswerable?

Linguistics Research Topics on Semantics

Language is nothing without meaning. These interesting linguistic topics show how meaning and language mix and relate. You can research any one of these topics to understand how this field.

How does meaning affect language analysis and interpretation?
What is the major cause of language ambiguity?
How do sentences relate to one another?
How do speakers of different languages acquire a sense of meaning in conversation?
How can the meaning of words relate?
An in-depth analysis into how language is used and acquired in different communities

Tough Linguistics Research Topics

Do all the topics above seem too easy for you? Do you want something more challenging? We have a few topics for you. These topics would give you that challenge you want. Ensure that you do enough research on topics before you embark on them.

Why do people speak different languages?
What makes language translation possible?
What makes some languages harder to learn than others?
Why are English and French words similar?
Why does the mother tongue always affect pronunciation?
Does sign language only involve the hands?

How to Choose A Perfect Linguistics Topic for You

There are different aspects of linguistics. If you check online, you would find linguistic anthropology research topics, computational linguistics research topics, and much more. However, not all these aspects of linguistics would be perfect for your dissertation or thesis.

In selecting or creating the perfect linguistic topic for you, here are some of the tips from our experts in paper writing you should take into consideration.

Pick an aspect that interest you . Linguistics apply to different walks of life. Therefore, there are varied topics for your linguistics research. It can make choosing a topic quite stressful. What you do is find what interests you and find topics in that aspect. Start by looking for a broad aspect then narrow it down to a part of the field. For instance, you can start with applied linguistics and move on to linguistics in politics.
Brainstorm with friends . After you have chosen the aspect you like, you can pick a list of topics in linguistics for research papers and bounce off ideas from the topics with your friends. You can even write out your ideas from your brainstorming and ask your friends what they think about them. The topic that you notice that you and your friends keep going back to is possibly the best one for you. If you find a lot of things to talk about it, you would possibly find a lot of things to write about it.
Research the topics . Talk is cheap though. If you want to write on a topic, ensure that there are enough materials to support your claims. After you and your friends decide on a topic, research the topic before you start writing. Once you find that there are enough materials, you can start.

Linguistics has different aspects. If you check online and on our list, you would find different topics in these aspects, including topics related to linguistic diversity. Follow our guide and list to find the best linguistic topic for you!

Questions? Call us:

Email:

How it works
Testimonials

Essay Writing

Essay service
Essay writers
College essay service
Write my essay
Pay for essay
Essay topics

Term Paper Writing

Term paper service
Buy term papers
Term paper help
Term paper writers
College term papers
Write my term paper
Pay for term paper
Term paper topic

Research Paper Writing

Research paper service
Buy research paper
Research paper help
Research paper writers
College research papers
Write my research paper
Pay for research paper
Research paper topics

Dissertation Writing

Dissertation service
Buy dissertation
Dissertation help
Dissertation writers
College thesis
Write my dissertation
Pay for dissertation
Dissertation topics

Other Services

Custom writing services
Speech writing service
Movie review writing
Editing service
Assignment writing
Article writing service
Book report writing
Book review writing

Popular request:

100 best linguistic research topics.

November 26, 2020

Some learners struggle to choose linguistic research topics to research and write about. That’s because linguistics is interesting to learn about yet challenging to write papers and essays about. Some students stay up at night learning about phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Unfortunately, they still struggle to write quality papers and essays on linguistic topics in these areas. If looking for ideas to form the basis of your paper or essay, here is a list of research topics in linguistics to consider.

Linguistic Research Topics in Discourse Studies

Discourse studies provide fascinating details about individuals, culture, technology, movements, and changes that take place over time. If looking for linguistics topics that relate to discourse studies, here are some of the best ideas to consider. You can also check out our communication research topics .

Childhood is the time when speech is made or broken
Cultivation of politicians’ buzzword through linguistic analysis
How linguistic patterns are sued to locate migration paths
How computers affect modern language negatively
How text messaging has created a new linguistic subculture
How the brain works when it comes to learning a new language
How words change over time
How effective is non-verbal communication when it comes to displaying emotions?
How effective is verbal communication when it comes to displaying feelings?
How society alters words and their meanings
How the negative power of a word be reduced by neuro-linguistic programming for trauma victims
Is verbal communication more effective than non-verbal communication?
How individuals communicate without a shared language
How beneficial is learning more than one language during childhood?
Why should Elementary School teach students a second language?
Explain the acquisition of a language at different growth stages
How global leaders use language ethics to change the emotional views of the masses
Explain the power of a language in capitalizing on emotions
How technology alters the communication
How proper use of a language makes a person better in society

A learner should pick a linguistics topic in this category if it piques their interest. That’s because writing a great paper or essay requires a student to explore an idea that they are interested in. Essentially, a learner should research and write about something that they find enjoyable.

Interesting Linguistic Topics for Research

Some topics in linguistics are very interesting to research. These are ideas that most people in society will find enjoyable to read about. Here is a list of the most interesting linguistics topics that students can choose for their papers and essays.

Explain how sociolinguistics help people understand multi-lingual language choices
A study of differences and similarities of Post-Tudor English
How language encourages gender differences
Understanding socio-linguistics via color and race background in America
Vowel pronunciation in the UK- A systematic review
The role of music in language evolution
Explain the development and evolution of slangs
A study of the connection between perception and language
How language creates bonds among cross-cultural communities
Language review in informal and formal settings
How age affects English pronunciation
A phonological treatment based review for English-French load words
How sociolinguistics influence gender empowerment
How words can be used to master legal settings
How the media use sociolinguistics to gain a competitive edge and create bias
Exploratory analysis of the impact and importance of body language
Importance of sociolinguistics education in discipline development
How genders perceive politeness via language use
A study of social change through history via sociolinguistics
An evaluation of English evolution via a focus on different sociolinguistics

The vast majority of topics in this category touches on language and society. That’s why papers and essays about these linguistic research topics will most likely impress many readers.

Applied Linguistics Research Paper Topics

Applied linguistics focus on finding meaningful language solutions to real-world issues. Some of the best linguistic paper topics to consider in this category include the following.

The beauty idea and its expression verbally
A detailed evaluation of hate language
What are the key determinants of hate language propagation?
A literature-based review that explores eye-tracking technology and its implication for applied linguistics advancement
A detailed evaluation of research methods for applied linguistics
How relevant is the development of applied linguistics?
Discuss the impacts of the language used in social media on the current generation
An essay on the impact of using proper linguistic communication in social media
Are applied linguistics relevant in the current digitalized world?
How political oppression affect the linguistic used in the media
How important is applied linguistics vocationally?
The major differences between spoken and written language via linguistics evaluation
Is multilingualism a possibility that follows bilingualism?
What is the contribution of a language to national identity within a multicultural society?
How effective is healthcare delivery when there are language barriers?
Is the language barrier relevant in social media?
How bilingualism enriches the personality of an individual
Discuss language cognition and perceptions during the learning process
Discuss the learning mechanisms when it comes to a foreign language
Explain how a non-native teacher can teach local students the English language

These can also be great dissertation topics in linguistics. That’s because they require extensive research and analysis of facts to write brilliant papers. So, if struggling to find an idea for your dissertation, consider one of these thesis topics in applied linguistics.

Great Linguistics Essay Topics

Perhaps, you’re looking for a list of English linguistics research topics from which you can get ideal for your essay. In that case, consider these amazing research proposal topics in linguistics.

Discuss the new generative grammar concept
Analysis of pragmatics and semantics in two texts
Identity analysis in racist language
Do humans have a predisposition to learn a language?
English assessment as a second language
Endangered languages and language death causes
Attitudes towards a language and childhood language acquisition
Mixing modern language and code-switching
Linguistic turn and cognitive turn
What is computational linguistics?
Linguistic and cultural diversity as an educational issue
Differences between adults and childhood language learning
Factors that affect the ability to learn a language
A forensic assessment of linguistics
Lexical and grammatical changes
How important is a language?
What are the effects of language on human behavior?
English or indigenous languages?
Is language an essential element of human life?
Is language the primary communication medium?

These can be great topics for short essays. However, they can also be PhD thesis topics in linguistics where learners will have to conduct extensive and detailed research. The most important thing is to gather relevant and new information that will interest the readers.

Research Topics in Cognitive Linguistics

Students that want to explore questions in cognitive linguistics should consider topics in this category. Here are some of the most interesting topics in linguistics for research papers that also touch on cognition. If these ideas seem a bit complicated, use our writing services .

How grammatical phrasing affects compliance with prescriptions, prohibitions, or suggestions
Latest research findings into cognitive literacy in Indian English poetry
Conceptual metaphor: Does the activation of a single-source domain activates the multiple target concepts?
Multilingualism: Does L2 modulate L1/L2 organization in the brain?
Can task-based language teaching perception be measured?
Are there prominent cognitive-linguistic books for students?
What role does cognitive linguistics play in the acquisition of a second language?
Is word meaning a concept that is advocated for by some scholars?
Which linguistic experiments can be used to understand how the right and left hemispheres work?
Discuss the relationship between metaphors and similes

Computational Linguistics Research Topics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field that deals with rule-based or statistical modeling of the natural language from the computational perspectives. Here are some of the best topics for research in this field.

Using supervised learning to analyze Medieval German poetry
Which computer-assisted program is best for phonetic comparison of different dialects and why?
How and where can Danish verbs be extracted?
Can computational linguistic suggest an intra-lingual contrastive corpus analysis?
Where can the Schizophrenia text dataset be found?
Discuss the techniques used for meaning or semantic representation in the natural language processing
Describe performance measures for speech recognition
How to extract the introduction, development, and conclusion of a text
Discuss the addition of matrices in a dictionary in python
Explain the definition and characterization of linguistic dimensions in a multidimensional analysis

Students that are struggling to choose what to write about can pick any topic in this list that they find interesting, research, and write about it. Taking the time to research extensively and write quality papers or essays is what will earn learners their desired grades.

Take a break from writing.

Top academic experts are here for you.

How To Write An Autobiography Guideline And Useful Advice
182 Best Classification Essay Topics To Learn And Write About
How To Manage Stress In College: Top Practical Tips
How To Write A Narrative Essay: Definition, Tips, And A Step-by-Step Guide
How To Write Article Review Like Professional
Great Problem Solution Essay Topics
Creating Best Stanford Roommate Essay
Costco Essay – Best Writing Guide
How To Quote A Dialogue
Wonderful Expository Essay Topics
Research Paper Topics For 2020
Interesting Persuasive Essay Topics

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Publications
Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

Advanced Search
Journal List
Front Psychol

Trends and hot topics in linguistics studies from 2011 to 2021: A bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers

Associated data.

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found in the article/ supplementary material .

High citations most often characterize quality research that reflects the foci of the discipline. This study aims to spotlight the most recent hot topics and the trends looming from the highly cited papers (HCPs) in Web of Science category of linguistics and language & linguistics with bibliometric analysis. The bibliometric information of the 143 HCPs based on Essential Citation Indicators was retrieved and used to identify and analyze influential contributors at the levels of journals, authors, and countries. The most frequently explored topics were identified by corpus analysis and manual checking. The retrieved topics can be grouped into five general categories: multilingual-related , language teaching , and learning related , psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related , methods and tools-related , and others . Topics such as bi/multilingual(ism) , translanguaging , language/writing development , models , emotions , foreign language enjoyment (FLE) , cognition , anxiety are among the most frequently explored. Multilingual and positive trends are discerned from the investigated HCPs. The findings inform linguistic researchers of the publication characteristics of the HCPs in the linguistics field and help them pinpoint the research trends and directions to exert their efforts in future studies.

1. Introduction

Citations, as a rule, exhibit a skewed distributional pattern over the academic publications: a few papers accumulate an overwhelming large citations while the majority are rarely, if ever, cited. Correspondingly, the highly cited papers (HCPs) receive the greatest amount of attention in the academia as citations are commonly regarded as a strong indicator of research excellence. For academic professionals, following HCPs is an efficient way to stay current with the developments in a field and to make better informed decisions regarding potential research topics and directions to exert their efforts. For academic institutions, government and private agencies, and generally the science policy makers, they keep a close eye on and take advantage of this visible indicator, citations, to make more informed decisions on research funding allocation and science policy formulation. Under the backdrop of ever-growing academic outputs, there is noticeable attention shift from publication quantity to publication quality. Many countries are developing research policies to identify “excellent” universities, research groups, and researchers ( Danell, 2011 ). In a word, HCPs showcase high-quality research, encompass significant themes, and constitute a critical reference point in a research field as they are “gold bullion of science” ( Smith, 2007 ).

2. Literature review

Bibliometrics, a term coined by Pritchard (1969) , refers to the application of mathematical methods to the analysis of academic publications. Essentially this is a quantitative method to depict publication patterns within a given field based on a body of literature. There are many bibliometric studies on natural and social sciences in general ( Hsu and Ho, 2014 ; Zhu and Lei, 2022 ) and on various specific disciplines such as management sciences ( Liao et al., 2018 ), biomass research ( Chen and Ho, 2015 ), computer sciences ( Xie and Willett, 2013 ), and sport sciences ( Mancebo et al., 2013 ; Ríos et al., 2013 ), etc. In these studies, researchers tracked developments, weighed research impacts, and highlighted emerging scientific fronts with bibliometric methods. In the field of linguistics, bibliometric studies all occurred in the past few years ( van Doorslaer and Gambier, 2015 ; Lei and Liao, 2017 ; Gong et al., 2018 ; Lei and Liu, 2018 , 2019 ). These bibliometric studies mostly examined a sub-area of linguistics, such as corpus linguistics ( Liao and Lei, 2017 ), translation studies ( van Doorslaer and Gambier, 2015 ), the teaching of Chinese as a second/foreign language ( Gong et al., 2018 ), academic journals like System ( Lei and Liu, 2018 ) or Porta Linguarum ( Sabiote and Rodríguez, 2015 ), etc. Although Lei and Liu (2019) took the entire discipline of linguistics under investigation, their research is exclusively focused on applied linguistics and restricted in a limited number of journals (42 journals in total), leaving publications in other linguistics disciplines and qualified journals unexamined.

Over the recent years, a number of studies have been concerned with “excellent” papers or HCPs. For example, Small (2004) surveyed the HCPs authors’ opinions on why their papers are highly cited. The strong interest, the novelty, the utility, and the high importance of the work were among the most frequently mentioned. Most authors also considered that their selected HCPs are indeed based on their most important work in their academic career. Aksnes (2003) investigated the characteristics of HCPs and found that they were generally authored by a large number of scientists, often involving international collaboration. Some researchers even attempted to predict the HCPs by building mathematical models, implying “the first mover advantage in scientific publication” ( Newman, 2008 , 2014 ). In other words, papers published earlier in a field generally are more likely to accumulate more citations than those published later. Although many papers addressed HCPs from different perspectives, they held a common belief that HCPs are very different from less or zero cited papers and thus deserve utmost attention in academic research ( Aksnes, 2003 ; Blessinger and Hrycaj, 2010 ; Yan et al., 2022 ).

Although an increased focus on research quality can be observed in different fields, opinions diverge on the range and the inclusion criterion of excellent papers. Are they ‘highly cited’, ‘top cited’, or ‘most frequently cited’ papers? Aksnes (2003) noted two different approaches to define a highly cited article, involving absolute or relative thresholds, respectively. An absolute threshold stipulates a minimum number of citations for identifying excellent papers while a relative threshold employs the percentile rank classes, for example, the top 10% most highly cited papers in a discipline or in a publication year or in a publication set. It is important to note that citations differ significantly in different fields and disciplines. A HCP in natural sciences generally accumulates more citations than its counterpart in social sciences. Thus, it is necessary to investigate HCPs from different fields separately or adopt different inclusion criterion to ensure a valid comparison.

The present study has been motivated by two considerations. First, the sizable number of publications of varied qualities in a scientific field makes it difficult or even impossible to conduct any reliable and effective literature research. Focusing on the quality publications, the HCPs in particular, might lend more credibility to the findings on trends. Second, HCPs can serve as a great platform to discover potentially important information for the development of a discipline and understand the past, present, and future of the scientific structure. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the hot topics and publication trends in the Web of Science category of linguistics or language & linguistics (shortened as linguistics in later references) with bibliometric methods. The study aims to answer the following three questions:

Who are the most productive and impactful contributors of the HCPs in WoS category of linguistics or language & linguistics in terms of publication venues, authors, and countries?
What are the most frequently explored topics in HCPs?
What are the general research trends revealed from the HCPs?

3. Materials and methods

Different from previous studies which used an arbitrary inclusion threshold (e.g., Blessinger and Hrycaj, 2010 ; Hsu and Ho, 2014 ), we rely on Essential Science Indicator (ESI) to identify the HCPs. Developed by Clarivate, a leading company in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics, ESI reveals emerging science trends as well as influential individuals, institutions, papers, journals, and countries in any scientific fields of inquiry by drawing on the complete WoS databases. ESI has been chosen for the following three reasons. First, ESI adopts a stricter inclusion criterion for HCPs identification. That is, a paper is selected as a HCP only when its citations exceed the top 1% citation threshold in each of the 22 ESI subject categories. Second, ESI is widely used and recognized for its reliability and authority in identifying the top-charting work, generating “excellent” metrics including hot and highly cited papers. Third, ESI automatically updates its database to generate the most recent HCPs, especially suitable for trend studies for a specified timeframe.

3.1. Data source

The data retrieval was completed at the portal of our university library on June 20, 2022. The methods to retrieve the data are described in Table 1 . The bibliometric indicators regarding the important contributors at journal/author/country levels were obtained. Specifically, after the research was completed, we clicked the “Analyze Results” bar on the result page for the detailed descriptive analysis of the retrieved bibliometric data.

Retrieval strategies.

Several points should be noted about the search strategies. First, we searched the bibliometric data from two sub-databases of WoS core collection: Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI). There is no need to include the sub-database of Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) because publications in the linguistics field are almost exclusively indexed in SSCI and A&HCI journals. WoS core collection was chosen as the data source because it boasts one of the most comprehensive and authoritative databases of bibliometric information in the world. Many previous studies utilized WoS to retrieve bibliometric data. van Oorschot et al. (2018) and Ruggeri et al. (2019) even indicated that WoS meets the highest standards in terms of impact factor and citation counts and hence guarantees the validity of any bibliometric analysis. Second, we do not restrict the document types as HCPs selection informed by ESI only considers articles and reviews. Third, we do not set the date range as the dataset of ESI-HCPs is automatically updated regularly to include the most recent 10 years of publications.

The aforementioned query obtained a total of 143 HCPs published in 48 journals contributed by 352 authors of 226 institutions. We then downloaded the raw bibliometric parameters of the 143 HCPs for follow-up analysis including publication years, authors, publication titles, countries, affiliations, abstracts, citation reports, etc. A complete list of the 143 HCPs can be found in the Supplementary Material . We collected the most recent impact factor (IF) of each journal from the 2022 Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

3.2. Data analysis

3.2.1. citation analysis.

A citation threshold is the minimum number of citations obtained by ranking papers in a research field in descending order by citation counts and then selecting the top fraction or percentage of papers. In ESI, the highly cited threshold reveals the minimum number of citations received by the top 1% of papers from each of the 10 database years. In other words, a paper has to meet the minimum citation threshold that varies by research fields and by years to enter the HCP list. Of the 22 research fields in ESI, Social Science, General is a broad field covering a number of WoS categories including linguistics and language & linguistics . We checked the ESI official website to obtain the yearly highly cited thresholds in the research field of Social Science , General as shown in Figure 1 ( https://esi.clarivate.com/ThresholdsAction.action ). As we can see, the longer a paper has been published, the more citations it has to receive to meet the threshold. We then divided the raw citation numbers of HCPs with the Highly Cited Thresholds in the corresponding year to obtain the normalized citations for each HCP.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is fpsyg-13-1052586-g001.jpg

Highly cited thresholds in the research field of Social Sciences, General.

3.2.2. Corpus analysis and manual checking

To determine the most frequently explored topics in these HCPs, we used both corpus-based analysis of word frequency and manual checking. Specifically, the more frequently a word or phrase occurs in a specifically designed corpus, the more likely it constitutes a research topic. In this study, we built an Abstract corpus with all the abstracts of the 143 HCPs, totaling 24,800 tokens. The procedures to retrieve the research topics in the Abstract corpus were as follows. First, the 143 pieces of abstracts were saved as separate .txt files in one folder. Second, AntConc ( Anthony, 2022 ), a corpus analysis tool for concordancing and text analysis, was employed to extract lists of n-grams (2–4) in decreasing order of frequency. We also generated a list of individual nouns because sometimes individual nouns can also constitute research topics. Considering our small corpus data, we adopted both frequency (3) and range criteria (3) for topic candidacy. That is, a candidate n-gram must occur at least 3 times and in at least 3 different abstract files. The frequency threshold guarantees the importance of the candidate topics while the range threshold guarantees that the topics are not overly crowded in a few number of publications. In this process, we actually tested the frequency and range thresholds several rounds for the inclusion of all the potential topics. In total, we obtained 531 nouns, 1,330 2-grams, 331 3-grams, and 81 4-grams. Third, because most of the retrieved n-grams cannot function as meaningful research topics, we manually checked all the candidate items and discussed extensively to decide their roles as potential research topics until full agreements were reached. Finally, we read all the abstracts of the 143 HCPs to further validate their roles as research topics. In the end, we got 118 topic items in total.

4.1. Main publication venues of HCPs

Of the 48 journals which published the 143 HCPs, 17 journals have contributed at least 3 HCPs ( Table 2 ), around 71.33% of the total examined HCPs (102/143), indicating that HCPs tend to be highly concentrated in a limited number of journals. The three largest publication outlets of HCPs are Bilingualism Language and Cognition (16), International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (11), and Modern Language Journal (10). Because each journal varies greatly in the number of papers published per year and the number of HCPs is associated with journal circulations, we divided the total number of papers (TP) in the examined years (2011–2021) with the number of the HCPs to acquire the HCP percentage for each journal (HCPs/TP). The three journals with the highest HCPs/TP percentage are Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2.26), Modern Language Journal (2.08), and Bilingualism Language and Cognition (1.74), indicating that papers published in these journals have a higher probability to enter the HCPs list.

Top 17 publication venues of HCPs.

N: the number of HCPs in each journal; N%: the percentage of HCPs in each journal in the total of 143 HCPs; TP: the total number of papers in the examined timespan (2011–2021); N/TP %: the percentage of HCPs in the total journal publications in the examined time span; TC/HCP: average citations of each HCP; R: journal ranking for the designated indicator; IF: Impact Factor in the year of 2022.

In terms of the general impact of the HCPs from each journal, we divided the number of HCPs with their total citations (TC) to obtain the average citations for each HCP (TC/HCP). The three journals with the highest TC/HCP are Journal of Memory and Language (837.86), Computational Linguistics (533.75), and Journal of Pragmatics (303.75). It indicates that even in the same WoS category, HCPs in different journals have strikingly different capability to accumulate citations. For example, the TC/HCP in System is as low as 31.73, which is even less than 4% of the highest TC/HCP in Journal of Memory and Language .

In regards to the latest journal impact factor (IF) in 2022, the top four journals with the highest IF are Computational Linguistics (7.778) , Modern Language Journal (7.5), Computer Assisted Language Learning (5.964), and Language Learning (5.24). According to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) quantile rankings in WoS category of linguistics , all the journals on the list belong to the Q 1 (the top 25%), indicating that contributors are more likely to be attracted to contribute and cite papers in these prestigious high impact journals.

4.2. Authors of HCPs

A total of 352 authors had their names listed in the 143 HCPs, of whom 33 authors appeared in at least 2 HCPs as shown in Table 3 . We also provided in Table 3 other indicators to evaluate the authors’ productivity and impact including the total number of citations (TC), the number of citations per HCP, and the number of First author or Corresponding author HCPs (FA/CA). The reason we include the FA/CA indicator is that first authors and corresponding authors are usually considered to contribute the most and should receive greater proportion of credit in academic publications ( Marui et al., 2004 ; Dance, 2012 ).

Authors with at least 2 HCPs.

N: number of HCPs from each author; FA/CA: first author or corresponding author HCPs; TC: total citations of the HCPs from each author; C/HCP: average citations per HCP for each author.

In terms of the number of HCPs, Dewaele JM from Birkbeck Univ London tops the list with 7 HCPs with total citations of 492 (TC = 492), followed by Li C from Huazhong Univ Sci & Technol (#HCPs = 5; TC = 215) and Saito K from UCL (#HCPs = 5; TC = 576). It is to be noted that both Li C and Saito K have close academic collaborations with Dewaele JM . For example, 3 of the 5 HCPs by Li C are co-authored with Dewaele JM . The topics in their co-authored HCPs are mostly about foreign language learning emotions such as boredom , anxiety , enjoyment , the measurement , and positive psychology .

In regards to TC, Li, W . from UCL stands out as the most influential scholar among all the listed authors with total citations of 956 from 2 HCPs, followed by Norton B from Univ British Columbia (TC = 915) and Vasishth S from Univ Potsdam (TC = 694). The average citations per HCP from them are also the highest among the listed authors (478, 305, 347, respectively). It is important to note that Li, W.’ s 2 HCPs are his groundbreaking works on translanguaging which almost become must-reads for anyone who engages in translanguaging research ( Li, 2011 , 2018 ). Besides, Li, W. single authors his 2 HCPs, which is extremely rare as HCPs are often the results from multiple researchers. Norton B ’s HCPs are exploring some core issues in applied linguistics such as identity and investment , language learning , and social change that are considered the foundational work in its field ( Norton and Toohey, 2011 ; Darvin and Norton, 2015 ).

From the perspective of FA/CA papers, Li C from Huazhong Univ Sci and Technol is prominent because she is the first author of all her 5 HCPs. Her research on language learning emotions in the Chinese context is gaining widespread recognition ( Li et al., 2018 , 2019 , 2021 ; Li, 2019 , 2021 ). However, as a newly emerging researcher, most of her HCPs are published in the very recent years and hence accumulate relatively fewer citations (TC = 215). Mondada L from Univ Basel follows closely and single authors her 3 HCPs. Her work is mostly devoted to conversation analysis , multimodality , and social interaction ( Mondada, 2016 , 2018 , 2019 ).

We need to mention the following points regarding the productive authors of HCPs. First, when we calculated the number of HCPs from each author, only the papers published in the journals indexed in the investigated WoS categories were taken in account ( linguistics; language & linguistics ), which came as a compromise to protect the linguistics oriented nature of the HCPs. For example, Brysbaert M from Ghent University claimed a total of 8 HCPs at the time of the data retrieval, of which 6 HCPs were published in WoS category of psychology and more psychologically oriented, hence not included in our study. Besides, all the authors on the author list were treated equally when we calculated the number of HCPs, disregarding the author ordering. That implies that some influential authors may not be able to enter the list as their publications are comparatively fewer. Second, as some authors reported different affiliations at their different career stages, we only provide their most recent affiliation for convenience. Third, it is highly competitive to have one’s work selected as HCPs. The fact that a majority of the HCPs authors do not appear in our productive author list does not diminish their great contributions to this field. The rankings in Table 3 does not necessarily reflect the recognition authors have earned in academia at large.

4.3. Productive countries of HCPs

In total, the 143 HCPs originated from 33 countries. The most productive countries that contributed at least three HCPs are listed in Table 4 . The USA took an overwhelming lead with 59 HCPs, followed distantly by England with 31 HCPs. They also boasted the highest total citations (TC = 15,770; TC = 9,840), manifesting their high productivity and strong influence as traditional powerhouses in linguistics research. In regards to the average citations per HCP, Germany , England and the USA were the top three countries (TC/HCP = 281.67, 281.14, and 267.29, respectively). Although China held the third position with 19 HCPs published, its TC/HCP is the third from the bottom (TC/HCP = 66.84). One of the important reasons is that 13 out of the 19 HCPs contributed by scholars in China are published in the year of 2020 or 2021. The newly published HCPs may need more time to accumulate citations. Besides, 18 out of the 19 HCPs in China are first author and/or corresponding authors, indicating that scholars in China are becoming more independent and gaining more voice in English linguistics research.

Top 18 countries with at least 3 HCPs.

Two points should be noted here as to the productive countries. First, we calculated the HCP contributions from the country level instead of the region level. In other words, HCP contributions from different regions of the same country will be combined in the calculation. For example, HCPs from Scotland were added to the HCPs from England . HCPs from Hong Kong , Macau , and Taiwan are put together with the HCPs from Mainland China . In this way, a clear picture of the HCPs on the country level can be painted. Second, we manually checked the address information of the first author and corresponding author for each HCP. There are some cases where the first author or the corresponding author may report affiliations from more than one country. In this case, every country in their address list will be treated equally in the FA/CA calculation. In other word, a HCP may be classified into more than one country because of the different country backgrounds of the first and/or the corresponding author.

4.4. Top 20 HCPs

The top 20 HCPs with the highest normed citations are listed in decreasing order in Table 5 . The top cited publications can guide us to better understand the development and research topics in recent years.

Top 20 HCPs.

To save space, not full information about the HCPs is given. Some article titles have been abbreviated if they are too lengthy; for the authors, we report the first two authors and use “et al” if there are three authors or more; RC: raw citations; NC: normalized citations

By reading the titles and the abstracts of these top HCPs, we categorized the topics of the 20 HCPs into the following five groups: (i) statistical and analytical methods in (psycho)linguistics such as sentimental analysis, sentence simplification techniques, effect sizes, linear mixed models (#1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 14), (ii) language learning/teaching emotions such enjoyment, anxiety, boredom, stress (#11, 15, 16, 18, 19), (iii) translanguaging or multilinguilism (#5, 13, 20, 17), (iv) language perception (#2, 7, 10), (v) medium of instruction (#8, 12). It is no surprise that 6 out of the top 20 HCPs are about statistical methods in linguistics because language researchers aspire to employ statistics to make their research more scientific. Besides, we noticed that the papers on language teaching/learning emotions on the list are all published in the year of 2020 and 2021, indicating that these emerging topics may deserve more attention in future research. We also noticed two Covid-19 related articles (#16, 19) explored the emotions teachers and students experience during the pandemic, a timely response to the urgent need of the language learning and teaching community.

It is of special interest to note that papers from the journals indexed in multiple JCR categories seem to accumulate more citations. For example, Journal of Memory and Language , American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology , and Computational Linguistics are indexed both in SSCI and SCIE and contribute the top 4 HCPs, manifesting the advantage of these hybrid journals in amassing citations compared to the conventional language journals. Besides, different to findings from Yan et al. (2022) that most of the top HCPs in the field of radiology are reviews in document types, 19 out of the top 20 HCPs are research articles instead of reviews except Macaro et al. (2018) .

4.5. Most frequently explored topics of HCPs

After obtaining the corpus based topic items, we read all the titles and abstracts of the 143 HCPs to further validate their roles as research topics. Table 6 presents the top research topics with the observed frequency of 5 or above. We grouped these topics into five broad categories: bilingual-related, language learning/teaching-related, psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related, methods and tools-related, and others . The observed frequency count for each topic in the abstract corpus were included in the brackets. We found that about 34 of the 143 HCPs are exploring bilingual related issues, the largest share among all the categorized topics, testifying its academic popularity in the examined timespan. Besides, 30 of the 143 HCPs are investigating language learning/teaching-related issues, with topics ranging from learners (e.g., EFL learners, individual difference) to multiple learning variables (e.g., learning strategy, motivation, agency). The findings here will be validated by the analysis of the keywords.

Categorization of the most explored research topics.

N: the number of the HCPs in each topic category; ELF: English as a lingua franca; CLIL: content and language integrated learning; FLE: foreign language enjoyment; FLCA: foreign language classroom anxiety

Several points should be mentioned regarding the topic candidacy. First, for similar topic expressions, we used a cover term and added the frequency counts. For example, multilingualism is a cover term for bilinguals, bilingualism, plurilingualism, and multilingualism . Second, for nouns of singular and plural forms (e.g., emotion and emotions ) or for items with different spellings (e.g., meta analysis and meta analyses ), we combined the frequency counts. Third, we found that some longer items (3 grams and 4 grams) could be subsumed to short ones (2 grams or monogram) without loss of essential meaning (e.g., working memory from working memory capacity ). In this case, the shorter ones were kept for their higher frequency. Fourth, some highly frequent terms were discarded because they were too general to be valuable topics in language research, for example, applied linguistics , language use , second language .

5. Discussion and implications

Based on 143 highly cited papers collected from the WoS categories of linguistics , the present study attempts to present a bird’s eye view of the publication landscape and the most updated research themes reflected from the HCPs in the linguistics field. Specifically, we investigated the important contributors of HCPs in terms of journals, authors and countries. Besides, we spotlighted the research topics by corpus-based analysis of the abstracts and a detailed analysis of the top HCPs. The study has produced several findings that bear important implications.

The first finding is that the HCPs are highly concentrated in a limited journals and countries. In regards to journals, those in the spheres of bilingualism and applied linguistics (e.g., language teaching and learning) are likely to accumulate more citations and hence to produce more HCPs. Journals that focus on bilingualism from a linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific perspective are the most frequent outlets of HCPs as evidenced by the top two productive journals of HCPs, Bilingualism Language and Cognition and International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism . This can be explained by the multidisciplinary nature of bilingual-related research and the development of cognitive measurement techniques. The merits of analyzing publication venues of HCPs are two folds. One the one hand, it can point out which sources of high-quality publications in this field can be inquired for readers as most of the significant and cutting-edge achievements are concentrated in these prestigious journals. On the other hand, it also provides essential guidance or channels for authors or contributors to submit their works for higher visibility.

In terms of country distributions, the traditional powerhouses in linguistics research such as the USA and England are undoubtedly leading the HCP publications in both the number and the citations of the HCPs. However, developing countries are also becoming increasing prominent such as China and Iran , which could be traceable in the funding and support of national language policies and development policies as reported in recent studies ( Ping et al., 2009 ; Lei and Liu, 2019 ). Take China as an example. Along with economic development, China has given more impetus to academic outputs with increased investment in scientific research ( Lei and Liao, 2017 ). Therefore, researchers in China are highly motivated to publish papers in high-quality journals to win recognition in international academia and to deal with the publish or perish pressure ( Lee, 2014 ). These factors may explain the rise of China as a new emerging research powerhouse in both natural and social sciences, including English linguistics research.

The second finding is the multilingual trend in linguistics research. The dominant clustering of topics regarding multilingualism can be understood as a timely response to the multilingual research fever ( May, 2014 ). 34 out of the 143 HCPs have such words as bilingualism, bilingual, multilingualism , translanguaging , etc., in their titles, reflecting a strong multilingual tendency of the HCPs. Multilingual-related HCPs mainly involve three aspects: multilingualism from the perspectives of psycholinguistics and cognition (e.g., Luk et al., 2011 ; Leivada et al., 2020 ); multilingual teaching (e.g., Schissel et al., 2018 ; Ortega, 2019 ; Archila et al., 2021 ); language policies related to multilingualism (e.g., Shen and Gao, 2018 ). As a pedagogical process initially used to describe the bilingual classroom practice and also a frequently explored topic in HCPs, translanguaging is developed into an applied linguistics theory since Li’s Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language ( Li, 2018 ). The most common collocates of translanguaging in the Abstract corpus are pedagogy/pedagogies, practices, space/spaces . There are two main reasons for this multilingual turn. First, the rapid development of globalization, immigration, and overseas study programs greatly stimulate the use and research of multiple languages in different linguistic contexts. Second, in many non-English countries, courses are delivered through languages (mostly English) besides their mother tongue ( Clark, 2017 ). Students are required to use multiple languages as resources to learn and understand subjects and ideas. The burgeoning body of English Medium Instruction literature in higher education is in line with the rising interest in multilingualism. Due to the innate multidisciplinary nature, it is to be expected that, multilingualism, the topic du jour, is bound to attract more attention in the future.

The third finding is the application of Positive Psychology (PP) in second language acquisition (SLA), that is, the positive trend in linguistic research. In our analysis, 20 out of 143 HCPs have words or phrases such as emotions, enjoyment, boredom, anxiety , and positive psychology in their titles, which might signal a shift of interest in the psychology of language learners and teachers in different linguistic environments. Our study shows Foreign language enjoyment (FLE) is the most frequently explored emotion, followed by foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), the learners’ metaphorical left and right feet on their journey to acquiring the foreign language ( Dewaele and MacIntyre, 2016 ). In fact, the topics of PP are not entirely new to SLA. For example, studies of language motivations, affections, and good language learners all provide roots for the emergence of PP in SLA ( Naiman, 1978 ; Gardner, 2010 ). In recent years, both research and teaching applications of PP in SLA are building rapidly, with a diversity of topics already being explored such as positive education and PP interventions. It is to be noted that SLA also feeds back on PP theories and concepts besides drawing inspirations from it, which makes it “an area rich for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of ideas” ( Macintyre et al., 2019 ).

It should be noted that subjectivity is involved when we decide and categorize the candidate topic items based on the Abstract corpus. However, the frequency and range criteria guarantee that these items are actually more explored in multiple HCPs, thus indicating topic values for further investigation. Some high frequent n-grams are abandoned because they are too general or not meaningful topics. For example, applied linguistics is too broad to be included as most of the HCPs concern issues in this research line instead of theoretical linguistics. By meaningful topics, we mean that the topics can help journal editors and readers quickly locate their interested fields ( Lei and Liu, 2019 ), as the author keywords such as bilingualism , emotions , and individual differences . The examination of the few 3/4-grams and monograms (mostly nouns) revealed that most of them were either not meaningful topics or they could be subsumed in the 2-grams. Besides, there is inevitably some overlapping in the topic categorizations. For example, some topics in the language teaching and learning category are situated and discussed within the context of multilingualism. The merits of topic categorizations are two folds: to better monitor the overlapping between the Abstract corpus-based topic items and the keywords; to roughly delineate the research strands in the HCPs for future research.

It should also be noted that all the results were based on the retrieved HCPs only. The study did not aim to paint a comprehensive and full picture of the whole landscape of linguistic research. Rather, it specifically focused on the most popular literature in a specified timeframe, thus generating the snapshots or trends in linguistic research. One of the important merits of this methodology is that some newly emerging but highly cited researchers can be spotlighted and gain more academic attention because only the metrics of HCPs are considered in calculation. On the contrary, the exclusion of some other highly cited researchers in general such as Rod Ellis and Ken Hyland just indicates that their highly cited publications are not within our investigated timeframe and cannot be interpreted as their diminishing academic influence in the field. Besides, the study does not consider the issue of collaborators or collaborations in calculating the number of HCPs for two reasons. First, although some researchers are regular collaborators such as Li CC and Dewaele JM, their individual contribution can never be undermined. Second, the study also provides additional information about the number of the FA/CA HCPs from each listed author, which may aid readers in locating their interested research.

We acknowledge that our study has some limitations that should be addressed in future research. First, our study focuses on the HCPs extracted from WoS SSCI and A&HCI journals, the alleged most celebrated papers in this field. Future studies may consider including data from other databases such as Scopus to verify the findings of the present study. Second, our Abstract corpus-based method for topic extraction involved human judgement. Although the final list was the result of several rounds of discussions among the authors, it is difficult or even impossible to avoid subjectivity and some worthy topics may be unconsciously missed. Therefore, future research may consider employing automatic algorithms to extract topics. For example, a dependency-based machine learning approach can be used to identify research topics ( Zhu and Lei, 2021 ).

Data availability statement

Author contributions.

SY: conceptualization and methodology. SY and LZ: writing-review and editing and writing-original draft. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Fund of China MOE under the grant 20YJC740076 and 18YJC740141.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1052586/full#supplementary-material

Aksnes D. W. (2003). Characteristics of highly cited papers . Res. Eval. 12 , 159–170. doi: 10.3152/147154403781776645 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Anthony L. (2022). AntConc (version 4.0.5) Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available at: https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software (Accessed June 20, 2022).
Archila P. A., Molina J., Truscott de Mejía A.-M. (2021). Fostering bilingual scientific writing through a systematic and purposeful code-switching pedagogical strategy . Int. J. Biling. Educ. Biling. 24 , 785–803. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2018.1516189 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Blessinger K., Hrycaj P. (2010). Highly cited articles in library and information science: an analysis of content and authorship trends . Libr. Inf. Sci. Res. 32 , 156–162. doi: 10.1016/j.lisr.2009.12.007 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Chen H., Ho Y. S. (2015). Highly cited articles in biomass research: a bibliometric analysis . Renew. Sust. Energ. Rev. 49 , 12–20. doi: 10.1016/j.rser.2015.04.060 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Clark S. (2017). Translanguaging in higher education: beyond monolingual ideologies . Int. J. Biling. Educ. Biling. 22 , 1048–1051. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2017.1322568 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Dance A. (2012). Authorship: Who’s on first? Nature 489 , 591–593. doi: 10.1038/nj7417-591a, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Danell R. (2011). Can the quality of scientific work be predicted using information on the author’s track record? J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 62 , 50–60. doi: 10.1002/asi.21454 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Darvin R., Norton B. (2015). Identity and a model of Investment in Applied Linguistics . Annu. Rev. Appl. Linguist. 35 , 36–56. doi: 10.1017/S0267190514000191 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Dewaele J.-M., MacIntyre P. D. (2016). “ Foreign language enjoyment and foreign language classroom anxiety: the right and left feet of the language learner ” in Positive psychology in SLA . eds. Peter D. M., Tammy G., Sarah M. (Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters; ), 215–236. [ Google Scholar ]
Gardner R. (2010). Motivation and second language acquisition: The socio-educational model . New York: Peter Lang. [ Google Scholar ]
Gong Y., Lyu B., Gao X. (2018). Research on teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language in and outside mainland China: a bibliometric analysis . Asia Pac. Educ. Res. 27 , 277–289. doi: 10.1007/s40299-018-0385-2 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Hsu Y., Ho Y. S. (2014). Highly cited articles in health care sciences and services field in science citation index Expanded . Methods Inf. Med. 53 , 446–458. doi: 10.3414/ME14-01-0022, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Lee I. (2014). Publish or perish: the myth and reality of academic publishing . Lang. Teach. 47 , 250–261. doi: 10.1017/S0261444811000504 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Lei L., Liao S. (2017). Publications in linguistics journals from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau (2003–2012): a bibliometric analysis . J. Quant. Ling. 24 , 54–64. doi: 10.1080/09296174.2016.1260274 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Lei L., Liu D. (2018). The research trends and contributions of System’s publications over the past four decades (1973–2017): a bibliometric analysis . System 80 , 1–13. doi: 10.1016/j.system.2018.10.003 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Lei L., Liu D. (2019). Research trends in applied linguistics from 2005 to 2016: a bibliometric analysis and its implications . Appl. Linguis. 40 , 540–561. doi: 10.1093/applin/amy003 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Leivada E., Westergaard M., Duabeitia J. A., Rothman J. (2020). On the phantom-like appearance of bilingualism effects on neurocognition: (how) should we proceed? Biling. Lang. Congn. 24 , 197–210. doi: 10.1017/S1366728920000358 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li W. (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain . Energy Fuel 43 , 1222–1235. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.07.035 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li W. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language . Appl. Linguis. 39 , 9–30. doi: 10.1093/applin/amx039 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li C. (2019). A positive psychology perspective on Chinese EFL students’ trait emotional intelligence, foreign language enjoyment and EFL learning achievement . J. Multiling. Multicult. Dev. 41 , 246–263. doi: 10.1080/01434632.2019.1614187 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li C. (2021). A control-value theory approach to boredom in English classes among university students in China . Mod. Lang. J. 105 , 317–334. doi: 10.1111/modl.12693 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li C., Dewaele J. M., Hu Y. (2021). Foreign language learning boredom: conceptualization and measurement . Appl. Ling. Rev. doi: 10.1515/applirev-2020-0124 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li C., Dewaele J. M., Jiang G. (2019). The complex relationship between classroom emotions and EFL achievement in China . Appl. Ling. Rev. 11 , 485–510. doi: 10.1515/applirev-2018-0043 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li C., Jiang G., Jean-Marc D. (2018). Understanding Chinese high school students’ foreign language enjoyment: validation of the Chinese version of the foreign language enjoyment scale . System 76 , 183–196. doi: 10.1016/j.system.2018.06.004 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Liao S., Lei L. (2017). What we talk about when we talk about corpus: a bibliometric analysis of corpus-related research in linguistics (2000-2015) . Glottometrics 38 , 1–20. [ Google Scholar ]
Liao H., Tang M., Li Z., Lev B. (2018). Bibliometric analysis for highly cited papers in operations research and management science from 2008 to 2017 based on essential science indicators . Omega 88 , 223–236. doi: 10.1016/j.omega.2018.11.005 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Luk G., Sa E. D., Bialystok E. (2011). Is there a relation between onset age of bilingualism and enhancement of cognitive control? Biling. Lang. Cogn. 14 , 588–595. doi: 10.1017/S1366728911000010 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Macaro E., Curle S., Pun J., Dearden J. (2018). A systematic review of English medium instruction in higher education . Lang. Teach. 51 , 36–76. doi: 10.1017/S0261444817000350 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Macintyre P., Gregersen T., Mercer S. (2019). Setting an agenda for positive psychology in SLA: theory, practice, and research . Mod. Lang. J. 103 , 262–274. doi: 10.1111/modl.12544 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Mancebo F. P., Sapena A. F., Herrera M. V., González L., Toca H., Benavent R. A. (2013). Scientific literature analysis of judo in web of science . Arch. Budo 9 , 81–91. doi: 10.12659/AOB.883883 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Marui M., Bozikov J., Katavi V., Hren D., Kljakovi-Gapi M., Marui A. (2004). Authorship in a small medical journal: a study of contributorship statements by corresponding authors . Sci. Eng. Ethics 10 , 493–502. doi: 10.1007/s11948-004-0007-7, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
May S. (2014). The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and bilingual education . New York: Routledge. [ Google Scholar ]
Mondada L. (2016). Challenges of multimodality: language and the body in social interaction . J. Socioling. 20 , 336–366. doi: 10.1111/josl.1_12177 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Mondada L. (2018). Multiple temporalities of language and body in interaction: challenges for transcribing multimodality . Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 51 , 85–106. doi: 10.1080/08351813.2018.1413878 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Mondada L. (2019). Contemporary issues in conversation analysis: embodiment and materiality, multimodality and multisensoriality in social interaction . J. Pragmat. 145 , 47–62. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2019.01.016 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Naiman N. (1978). The good language learner . Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. [ Google Scholar ]
Newman M. (2008). The first-mover advantage in scientific publication . Eplasty 86 , 68001–68006. doi: 10.1209/0295-5075/86/68001 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Newman M. (2014). Prediction of highly cited papers . Eplasty 105 :28002. doi: 10.1209/0295-5075/105/28002 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Norton B., Toohey K. (2011). Identity, language learning, and social change . Lang. Teach. 44 , 412–446. doi: 10.1017/S0261444811000309 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Ortega L. (2019). SLA and the study of equitable multilingualism . Mod. Lang. J. 103 , 23–38. doi: 10.1111/modl.12525 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Ping Z., Thijs B., Glnzel W. (2009). Is China also becoming a giant in social sciences? Scientometrics 79 , 593–621. doi: 10.1007/s11192-007-2068-x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Pritchard A. (1969). Statistical bibliography or bibliometrics . J. Doc. 25 , 348–349. [ Google Scholar ]
Ríos L. J. C., Tamao I. M., Olmos J. (2013). Bibliometric study (1922-2009) on rugby articles in research journals . South Afr. J. Res. Sport Phys. Educ. Rec. 17 , 313–109. doi: 10.3176/tr.2013.3.06 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Ruggeri G., Orsi L., Corsi S. (2019). A bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature on Fairtrade labelling . Int. IJC 43 , 134–152. doi: 10.1111/ijcs.12492 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Sabiote C. R., Rodríguez J. A. (2015). Bibliometric study and methodological quality indicators of the journal porta Linguarum during six year period 2008-2013 . Porta Ling. 24 , 135–150. doi: 10.30827/Digibug.53866 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Schissel J. L., De Korne H., López-Gopar M. E. (2018). Grappling with translanguaging for teaching and assessment in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts: teacher perspectives from Oaxaca, Mexico . Int. J. Biling. Educ. Biling. 24 , 340–356. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2018.1463965 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Shen Q., Gao X. (2018). Multilingualism and policy making in greater China: ideological and implementational spaces . Lang. Policy 18 , 1–16. doi: 10.1007/s10993-018-9473-7 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Small H. (2004). Why authors think their papers are highly cited . Scientometrics 60 , 305–316. doi: 10.1023/B:SCIE.0000034376.55800.18 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Smith D. R. (2007). The New Zealand timber economy, 1840–1935 . N. Z. Med. J. 120 , U2871–U2313. doi: 10.1016/0305-7488(90)90044-C, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
van Doorslaer L., Gambier Y. (2015). Measuring relationships in translation studies. On affiliations and keyword frequencies in the translation studies bibliography . Perspectives 23 , 305–319. doi: 10.1080/0907676X.2015.1026360 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
van Oorschot J. A. W. H., Hofman E., Halman J. (2018). A bibliometric review of the innovation adoption literature . Technol. Forecast. Soc. Chang. 134 , 1–21. doi: 10.1016/j.techfore.2018.04.032 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Xie Z., Willett P. (2013). The development of computer science research in the People’s republic of China 2000–2009: a bibliometric study . Inf. Dev. 29 , 251–264. doi: 10.1177/0266666912458515 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Yan S., Zhang H., Wang J. (2022). Trends and hot topics in radiology, nuclear medicine and medical imaging from 2011–2021: a bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers . Jpn. J. Radiol. 40 , 847–856. doi: 10.1007/s11604-022-01268-z, PMID: [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Zhu H., Lei L. (2021). A dependency-based machine learning approach to the identification of research topics: a case in COVID-19 studies . Lib. Hi Tech 40 , 495–515. doi: 10.1108/LHT-01-2021-0051 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Zhu H., Lei L. (2022). The research trends of text classification studies (2000–2020): a bibliometric analysis . SAGE Open 12 , 215824402210899–215824402210816. doi: 10.1177%2F21582440221089963 [ Google Scholar ]

Observation

The littlest linguists: new research on language development.

Bilingualism
Developmental Psychology
Language Development

How do children learn language, and how is language related to other cognitive and social skills? For decades, the specialized field of developmental psycholinguistics has studied how children acquire language—or multiple languages—taking into account biological, neurological, and social factors that influence linguistic developments and, in turn, can play a role in how children learn and socialize. Here’s a look at recent research (2020–2021) on language development published in Psychological Science .

Preverbal Infants Discover Statistical Word Patterns at Similar Rates as Adults: Evidence From Neural Entrainment

Dawoon Choi, Laura J. Batterink, Alexis K. Black, Ken A. Paller, and Janet F. Werker (2020)

One of the first challenges faced by infants during language acquisition is identifying word boundaries in continuous speech. This neurological research suggests that even preverbal infants can learn statistical patterns in language, indicating that they may have the ability to segment words within continuous speech.

Using electroencephalogram measures to track infants’ ability to segment words, Choi and colleagues found that 6-month-olds’ neural processing increasingly synchronized with the newly learned words embedded in speech over the learning period in one session in the laboratory. Specifically, patterns of electrical activity in their brains increasingly aligned with sensory regularities associated with word boundaries. This synchronization was comparable to that seen among adults and predicted future ability to discriminate words.

These findings indicate that infants and adults may follow similar learning trajectories when tracking probabilities in speech, with both groups showing a logarithmic (rather than linear) increase in the synchronization of neural processing with frequent words. Moreover, speech segmentation appears to use neural mechanisms that emerge early in life and are maintained throughout adulthood.

Parents Fine-Tune Their Speech to Children’s Vocabulary Knowledge

Ashley Leung, Alexandra Tunkel, and Daniel Yurovsky (2021)

Children can acquire language rapidly, possibly because their caregivers use language in ways that support such development. Specifically, caregivers’ language is often fine-tuned to children’s current linguistic knowledge and vocabulary, providing an optimal level of complexity to support language learning. In their new research, Leung and colleagues add to the body of knowledge involving how caregivers foster children’s language acquisition.

The researchers asked individual parents to play a game with their child (age 2–2.5 years) in which they guided their child to select a target animal from a set. Without prompting, the parents provided more informative references for animals they thought their children did not know. For example, if a parent thought their child did not know the word “leopard,” they might use adjectives (“the spotted, yellow leopard”) or comparisons (“the one like a cat”). This indicates that parents adjust their references to account for their children’s language knowledge and vocabulary—not in a simplifying way but in a way that could increase the children’s vocabulary. Parents also appeared to learn about their children’s knowledge throughout the game and to adjust their references accordingly.

Infant and Adult Brains Are Coupled to the Dynamics of Natural Communication

Elise A. Piazza, Liat Hasenfratz, Uri Hasson, and Casey Lew-Williams (2020)

This research tracked real-time brain activation during infant–adult interactions, providing an innovative measure of social interaction at an early age. When communicating with infants, adults appear to be sensitive to subtle cues that can modify their brain responses and behaviors to improve alignment with, and maximize information transfer to, the infants.

Piazza and colleagues used functional near-infrared spectroscopy—a noninvasive measure of blood oxygenation resulting from neural activity that is minimally affected by movements and thus allows participants to freely interact and move—to measure the brain activation of infants (9–15 months old) and adults while they communicated and played with each other. An adult experimenter either engaged directly with an infant by playing with toys, singing nursery rhymes, and reading a story or performed those same tasks while turned away from the child and toward another adult in the room.

Results indicated that when the adult interacted with the child (but not with the other adult), the activations of many prefrontal cortex (PFC) channels and some parietal channels were intercorrelated, indicating neural coupling of the adult’s and child’s brains. Both infant and adult PFC activation preceded moments of mutual gaze and increased before the infant smiled, with the infant’s PFC response preceding the adult’s. Infant PFC activity also preceded an increase in the pitch variability of the adult’s speech, although no changes occurred in the adult’s PFC, indicating that the adult’s speech influenced the infant but probably did not influence neural coupling between the child and the adult.

Theory-of-Mind Development in Young Deaf Children With Early Hearing Provisions

Chi-Lin Yu, Christopher M. Stanzione, Henry M. Wellman, and Amy R. Lederberg (2020)

Language and communication are important for social and cognitive development. Although deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children born to deaf parents can communicate with their caregivers using sign language, most DHH children are born to hearing parents who do not have experience with sign language. These children may have difficulty with early communication and experience developmental delays. For instance, the development of theory of mind—the understanding of others’ mental states—is usually delayed in DHH children born to hearing parents.

Yu and colleagues studied how providing DHH children with hearing devices early in life (before 2 years of age) might enrich their early communication experiences and benefit their language development, supporting the typical development of other capabilities—in particular, theory of mind. The researchers show that 3- to 6-year-old DHH children who began using cochlear implants or hearing aids earlier had more advanced language abilities, leading to better theory-of-mind growth, than children who started using hearing provisions later. These findings highlight the relationships among hearing, language, and theory of mind.

The Bilingual Advantage in Children’s Executive Functioning Is Not Related to Language Status: A Meta-Analytic Review

Cassandra J. Lowe, Isu Cho, Samantha F. Goldsmith, and J. Bruce Morton (2021)

Acommon idea is that bilingual children, who grow up speaking two languages fluently, perform better than monolingual children in diverse executive-functioning domains (e.g., attention, working memory, decision making). This meta-analysis calls that idea into question.

Lowe and colleagues synthesized data from studies that compared the performance of monolingual and bilingual participants between the ages of 3 and 17 years in executive-functioning domains (1,194 effect sizes). They found only a small effect of bilingualism on participants’ executive functioning, which was largely explained by factors such as publication bias. After accounting for these factors, bilingualism had no distinguishable effect. The results of this large meta-analysis thus suggest that bilingual and monolingual children tend to perform at the same level in executive-functioning tasks. Bilingualism does not appear to boost performance in executive functions that serve learning, thinking, reasoning, or problem solving.

APS regularly opens certain online articles for discussion on our website. Effective February 2021, you must be a logged-in APS member to post comments. By posting a comment, you agree to our Community Guidelines and the display of your profile information, including your name and affiliation. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations present in article comments are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of APS or the article’s author. For more information, please see our Community Guidelines .

Please login with your APS account to comment.

Teaching: Ethical Research to Help Romania’s Abandoned Children

An early intervention experiment in Bucharest can introduce students to the importance of responsive caregiving during human development.

Silver Linings in the Demographic Revolution

Podcast: In her final column as APS President, Alison Gopnik makes the case for more effectively and creatively caring for vulnerable humans at either end of life.

Communicating Psychological Science: The Lifelong Consequences of Early Language Skills

“When families are informed about the importance of conversational interaction and are provided training, they become active communicators and directly contribute to reducing the word gap (Leung et al., 2020).”

Privacy Overview

Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, 113 great research paper topics.

General Education

One of the hardest parts of writing a research paper can be just finding a good topic to write about. Fortunately we've done the hard work for you and have compiled a list of 113 interesting research paper topics. They've been organized into ten categories and cover a wide range of subjects so you can easily find the best topic for you.

In addition to the list of good research topics, we've included advice on what makes a good research paper topic and how you can use your topic to start writing a great paper.

What Makes a Good Research Paper Topic?

Not all research paper topics are created equal, and you want to make sure you choose a great topic before you start writing. Below are the three most important factors to consider to make sure you choose the best research paper topics.

#1: It's Something You're Interested In

A paper is always easier to write if you're interested in the topic, and you'll be more motivated to do in-depth research and write a paper that really covers the entire subject. Even if a certain research paper topic is getting a lot of buzz right now or other people seem interested in writing about it, don't feel tempted to make it your topic unless you genuinely have some sort of interest in it as well.

#2: There's Enough Information to Write a Paper

Even if you come up with the absolute best research paper topic and you're so excited to write about it, you won't be able to produce a good paper if there isn't enough research about the topic. This can happen for very specific or specialized topics, as well as topics that are too new to have enough research done on them at the moment. Easy research paper topics will always be topics with enough information to write a full-length paper.

Trying to write a research paper on a topic that doesn't have much research on it is incredibly hard, so before you decide on a topic, do a bit of preliminary searching and make sure you'll have all the information you need to write your paper.

#3: It Fits Your Teacher's Guidelines

Don't get so carried away looking at lists of research paper topics that you forget any requirements or restrictions your teacher may have put on research topic ideas. If you're writing a research paper on a health-related topic, deciding to write about the impact of rap on the music scene probably won't be allowed, but there may be some sort of leeway. For example, if you're really interested in current events but your teacher wants you to write a research paper on a history topic, you may be able to choose a topic that fits both categories, like exploring the relationship between the US and North Korea. No matter what, always get your research paper topic approved by your teacher first before you begin writing.

113 Good Research Paper Topics

Below are 113 good research topics to help you get you started on your paper. We've organized them into ten categories to make it easier to find the type of research paper topics you're looking for.

Arts/Culture

Discuss the main differences in art from the Italian Renaissance and the Northern Renaissance .
Analyze the impact a famous artist had on the world.
How is sexism portrayed in different types of media (music, film, video games, etc.)? Has the amount/type of sexism changed over the years?
How has the music of slaves brought over from Africa shaped modern American music?
How has rap music evolved in the past decade?
How has the portrayal of minorities in the media changed?

Current Events

What have been the impacts of China's one child policy?
How have the goals of feminists changed over the decades?
How has the Trump presidency changed international relations?
Analyze the history of the relationship between the United States and North Korea.
What factors contributed to the current decline in the rate of unemployment?
What have been the impacts of states which have increased their minimum wage?
How do US immigration laws compare to immigration laws of other countries?
How have the US's immigration laws changed in the past few years/decades?
How has the Black Lives Matter movement affected discussions and view about racism in the US?
What impact has the Affordable Care Act had on healthcare in the US?
What factors contributed to the UK deciding to leave the EU (Brexit)?
What factors contributed to China becoming an economic power?
Discuss the history of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies (some of which tokenize the S&P 500 Index on the blockchain) .
Do students in schools that eliminate grades do better in college and their careers?
Do students from wealthier backgrounds score higher on standardized tests?
Do students who receive free meals at school get higher grades compared to when they weren't receiving a free meal?
Do students who attend charter schools score higher on standardized tests than students in public schools?
Do students learn better in same-sex classrooms?
How does giving each student access to an iPad or laptop affect their studies?
What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Montessori Method ?
Do children who attend preschool do better in school later on?
What was the impact of the No Child Left Behind act?
How does the US education system compare to education systems in other countries?
What impact does mandatory physical education classes have on students' health?
Which methods are most effective at reducing bullying in schools?
Do homeschoolers who attend college do as well as students who attended traditional schools?
Does offering tenure increase or decrease quality of teaching?
How does college debt affect future life choices of students?
Should graduate students be able to form unions?

What are different ways to lower gun-related deaths in the US?
How and why have divorce rates changed over time?
Is affirmative action still necessary in education and/or the workplace?
Should physician-assisted suicide be legal?
How has stem cell research impacted the medical field?
How can human trafficking be reduced in the United States/world?
Should people be able to donate organs in exchange for money?
Which types of juvenile punishment have proven most effective at preventing future crimes?
Has the increase in US airport security made passengers safer?
Analyze the immigration policies of certain countries and how they are similar and different from one another.
Several states have legalized recreational marijuana. What positive and negative impacts have they experienced as a result?
Do tariffs increase the number of domestic jobs?
Which prison reforms have proven most effective?
Should governments be able to censor certain information on the internet?
Which methods/programs have been most effective at reducing teen pregnancy?
What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Keto diet?
How effective are different exercise regimes for losing weight and maintaining weight loss?
How do the healthcare plans of various countries differ from each other?
What are the most effective ways to treat depression ?
What are the pros and cons of genetically modified foods?
Which methods are most effective for improving memory?
What can be done to lower healthcare costs in the US?
What factors contributed to the current opioid crisis?
Analyze the history and impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic .
Are low-carbohydrate or low-fat diets more effective for weight loss?
How much exercise should the average adult be getting each week?
Which methods are most effective to get parents to vaccinate their children?
What are the pros and cons of clean needle programs?
How does stress affect the body?
Discuss the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
What were the causes and effects of the Salem Witch Trials?
Who was responsible for the Iran-Contra situation?
How has New Orleans and the government's response to natural disasters changed since Hurricane Katrina?
What events led to the fall of the Roman Empire?
What were the impacts of British rule in India ?
Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary?
What were the successes and failures of the women's suffrage movement in the United States?
What were the causes of the Civil War?
How did Abraham Lincoln's assassination impact the country and reconstruction after the Civil War?
Which factors contributed to the colonies winning the American Revolution?
What caused Hitler's rise to power?
Discuss how a specific invention impacted history.
What led to Cleopatra's fall as ruler of Egypt?
How has Japan changed and evolved over the centuries?
What were the causes of the Rwandan genocide ?

Why did Martin Luther decide to split with the Catholic Church?
Analyze the history and impact of a well-known cult (Jonestown, Manson family, etc.)
How did the sexual abuse scandal impact how people view the Catholic Church?
How has the Catholic church's power changed over the past decades/centuries?
What are the causes behind the rise in atheism/ agnosticism in the United States?
What were the influences in Siddhartha's life resulted in him becoming the Buddha?
How has media portrayal of Islam/Muslims changed since September 11th?

Science/Environment

How has the earth's climate changed in the past few decades?
How has the use and elimination of DDT affected bird populations in the US?
Analyze how the number and severity of natural disasters have increased in the past few decades.
Analyze deforestation rates in a certain area or globally over a period of time.
How have past oil spills changed regulations and cleanup methods?
How has the Flint water crisis changed water regulation safety?
What are the pros and cons of fracking?
What impact has the Paris Climate Agreement had so far?
What have NASA's biggest successes and failures been?
How can we improve access to clean water around the world?
Does ecotourism actually have a positive impact on the environment?
Should the US rely on nuclear energy more?
What can be done to save amphibian species currently at risk of extinction?
What impact has climate change had on coral reefs?
How are black holes created?
Are teens who spend more time on social media more likely to suffer anxiety and/or depression?
How will the loss of net neutrality affect internet users?
Analyze the history and progress of self-driving vehicles.
How has the use of drones changed surveillance and warfare methods?
Has social media made people more or less connected?
What progress has currently been made with artificial intelligence ?
Do smartphones increase or decrease workplace productivity?
What are the most effective ways to use technology in the classroom?
How is Google search affecting our intelligence?
When is the best age for a child to begin owning a smartphone?
Has frequent texting reduced teen literacy rates?

How to Write a Great Research Paper

Even great research paper topics won't give you a great research paper if you don't hone your topic before and during the writing process. Follow these three tips to turn good research paper topics into great papers.

#1: Figure Out Your Thesis Early

Before you start writing a single word of your paper, you first need to know what your thesis will be. Your thesis is a statement that explains what you intend to prove/show in your paper. Every sentence in your research paper will relate back to your thesis, so you don't want to start writing without it!

As some examples, if you're writing a research paper on if students learn better in same-sex classrooms, your thesis might be "Research has shown that elementary-age students in same-sex classrooms score higher on standardized tests and report feeling more comfortable in the classroom."

If you're writing a paper on the causes of the Civil War, your thesis might be "While the dispute between the North and South over slavery is the most well-known cause of the Civil War, other key causes include differences in the economies of the North and South, states' rights, and territorial expansion."

#2: Back Every Statement Up With Research

Remember, this is a research paper you're writing, so you'll need to use lots of research to make your points. Every statement you give must be backed up with research, properly cited the way your teacher requested. You're allowed to include opinions of your own, but they must also be supported by the research you give.

#3: Do Your Research Before You Begin Writing

You don't want to start writing your research paper and then learn that there isn't enough research to back up the points you're making, or, even worse, that the research contradicts the points you're trying to make!

Get most of your research on your good research topics done before you begin writing. Then use the research you've collected to create a rough outline of what your paper will cover and the key points you're going to make. This will help keep your paper clear and organized, and it'll ensure you have enough research to produce a strong paper.

What's Next?

Are you also learning about dynamic equilibrium in your science class? We break this sometimes tricky concept down so it's easy to understand in our complete guide to dynamic equilibrium .

Thinking about becoming a nurse practitioner? Nurse practitioners have one of the fastest growing careers in the country, and we have all the information you need to know about what to expect from nurse practitioner school .

Want to know the fastest and easiest ways to convert between Fahrenheit and Celsius? We've got you covered! Check out our guide to the best ways to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit (or vice versa).

These recommendations are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links, PrepScholar may receive a commission.

Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

Student and Parent Forum

Our new student and parent forum, at ExpertHub.PrepScholar.com , allow you to interact with your peers and the PrepScholar staff. See how other students and parents are navigating high school, college, and the college admissions process. Ask questions; get answers.

Ask a Question Below

Have any questions about this article or other topics? Ask below and we'll reply!

Improve With Our Famous Guides

For All Students

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 160+ SAT Points

How to Get a Perfect 1600, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 800 on Each SAT Section:

Score 800 on SAT Math

Score 800 on SAT Reading

Score 800 on SAT Writing

Series: How to Get to 600 on Each SAT Section:

Score 600 on SAT Math

Score 600 on SAT Reading

Score 600 on SAT Writing

Free Complete Official SAT Practice Tests

What SAT Target Score Should You Be Aiming For?

15 Strategies to Improve Your SAT Essay

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 4+ ACT Points

How to Get a Perfect 36 ACT, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 36 on Each ACT Section:

36 on ACT English

36 on ACT Math

36 on ACT Reading

36 on ACT Science

Series: How to Get to 24 on Each ACT Section:

24 on ACT English

24 on ACT Math

24 on ACT Reading

24 on ACT Science

What ACT target score should you be aiming for?

ACT Vocabulary You Must Know

ACT Writing: 15 Tips to Raise Your Essay Score

How to Get Into Harvard and the Ivy League

How to Get a Perfect 4.0 GPA

How to Write an Amazing College Essay

What Exactly Are Colleges Looking For?

Is the ACT easier than the SAT? A Comprehensive Guide

Should you retake your SAT or ACT?

When should you take the SAT or ACT?

Stay Informed

Get the latest articles and test prep tips!

Looking for Graduate School Test Prep?

Check out our top-rated graduate blogs here:

GRE Online Prep Blog

GMAT Online Prep Blog

TOEFL Online Prep Blog

Holly R. "I am absolutely overjoyed and cannot thank you enough for helping me!”

Alzheimer's disease & dementia
Arthritis & Rheumatism
Attention deficit disorders
Autism spectrum disorders
Biomedical technology
Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes
Endocrinology & Metabolism
Gastroenterology
Gerontology & Geriatrics
Health informatics
Inflammatory disorders
Medical economics
Medical research
Medications
Neuroscience
Obstetrics & gynaecology
Oncology & Cancer
Ophthalmology
Overweight & Obesity
Parkinson's & Movement disorders
Psychology & Psychiatry
Radiology & Imaging
Sleep disorders
Sports medicine & Kinesiology
Vaccination
Breast cancer
Cardiovascular disease
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
Colon cancer
Coronary artery disease
Heart attack
Heart disease
High blood pressure
Kidney disease
Lung cancer
Multiple sclerosis
Myocardial infarction
Ovarian cancer
Post traumatic stress disorder
Rheumatoid arthritis
Schizophrenia
Skin cancer
Type 2 diabetes
Full List »

share this!

April 22, 2024

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

fact-checked

trusted source

Q&A: New research unveils three distinct language comprehension phenotypes in autistic children

by Katherine Gianni, Boston University

According to The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD, can affect children's language development and communication in a variety of ways . While some children with ASD may encounter difficulties communicating verbally, others exhibit impressive vocabularies and the ability to speak on specific topic areas in detail.

A new study led by Boston University neuroscientist Dr. Andrey Vyshedskiy examines these unique pathways of language development in autistic children. Published in npj Mental Health Research , this research, encompassing data from more than 31,000 autistic individuals, stands as the most extensive of its kind on language comprehension acquisition in autism.

Dr. Vyshedskiy's study supports an idea he had more than two decades ago: that language learning for autistic individuals doesn't happen in a straight line but goes through three different stages. In this Q&A, he discusses the key takeaways from the research, and its implications for clinicians, educators, and caregivers.

Can you summarize the main insights from this study?

The common intuitive belief is that language comprehension development follows a linear trajectory: children acquire one grammatical rule at a time. Based on a neurological approach, I predicted over 20 years ago that instead of linear development, language unfolds in three steps corresponding to three language comprehension mechanisms of increasing complexity.

The new study of more than 31,000 autistic individuals, published in the journal npj Mental Health Research , validates this prediction. The implications of this discovery are important for philosophy, paleoanthropology, linguistics, clinical medicine, and for improving language therapy interventions for children with autism.

What was the traditional understanding of how children develop language, and how does this research challenge that view?

The current practice of characterizing children's communication ability only in terms of their speech (i.e., verbal, nonverbal, or minimally verbal) is insufficient and one-sided. The new results show that communication abilities can vary independent of verbal abilities. For example, nonverbal children with full syntactic language comprehension have normal ability to communicate albeit nonverbally, while verbal children lacking syntactic language comprehension do not have a normal ability to communicate by any means.

The new study demonstrates that the three identified language comprehension mechanisms are neurologically and clinically distinct from the speech ability. A combined two-dimensional language characterization in terms of both language comprehension and verbal level will result in better identification of children's communication ability and lead to more children reaching their full linguistic potential.

How many people were involved in this study? How did the research team collect and analyze information?

This is the largest study of language comprehension acquisition in autistic children. The study included over 31,000 individuals. The study was conducted by surveying parents via a language therapy app popular among families with children diagnosed with autism and other language deficits.

Based on your research findings, how might clinicians and educators adapt their approaches to assessment and intervention to better address the diverse communication abilities of autistic children?

Language comprehension in children is commonly assessed based on vocabulary. This evaluation method can grossly misrepresent the child's actual language comprehension progress. Moreover, it encourages therapists to focus on vocabulary training at the expense of exercises that build full language comprehension.

The new study provides evidence for creating new assessments evaluating the three mechanisms of language comprehension. These assessments are poised to improve language therapy interventions and enhance outcomes for individuals with language deficits.

What advice would you give to parents or caregivers based on the implications of this research for understanding and fostering language development in autistic children?

Focus all your efforts on improving your child's language comprehension. Connecting words is more important than building vocabulary. You can find language comprehension exercises in the book I wrote for parents, "This Way to Language: Four Things to Do at the First Sign of Autism."

Moving forward, what areas of research or practice do you believe warrant further exploration to better understand and help autistic children with their language development?

Our recent research demonstrates that the critical period for language acquisition is significantly shorter in autistic children compared to typical children. The shortened critical period may be the main culprit preventing autistic children from acquiring full language. These findings suggest that intensive language therapy has to start much earlier in children with suspected language deficits and encourages research into the possibility of pharmacological extension of the critical period for language acquisition.

Explore further

Feedback to editors

Genetic variations may predispose people to Parkinson's disease following long-term pesticide exposure, study finds

2 hours ago

Link between depression and cardiovascular disease explained: They partly develop from same gene module

7 hours ago

Study highlights increased risk of second cancers among breast cancer survivors

12 hours ago

Opioids during pregnancy not linked to substantially increased risk of psychiatric disorders in children

13 hours ago

Research identifies pitfalls and opportunities for generative AI in patient messaging systems

A closed-loop drug-delivery system could improve chemotherapy

14 hours ago

It's easier now to treat opioid addiction with medication—but use has changed little, study finds

Solving the riddle of the sphingolipids in coronary artery disease

15 hours ago

New AI technology estimates brain age using low-cost EEG device

Alteration of brain network condition could predict painful vaso-occlusive crisis in patients with sickle cell disease

16 hours ago

How vocabulary breadth and depth influence bilingual reading comprehension

Aug 21, 2023

Language acquisition may work differently in people with autism

Sep 20, 2023

COVID lockdowns may have boosted opportunities for bilingual autistic children's communication development

Mar 8, 2023

Avoiding ableist language in autism research

Oct 9, 2020

How having conversations with children builds their language—and strengthens family connections

Feb 19, 2024

Learning a new language recruits the right side of the brain

Nov 11, 2020

Recommended for you

New study prompts call for considering cholesterol screening earlier in life

21 hours ago

Large study finds children with skin diseases suffer stigma, bullying and depression

20 hours ago

Perinatal transmission of HIV can lead to cognitive deficits

Apr 23, 2024

Study reveals alarming rates of pediatric injuries from mechanical bull riding

Study finds COVID-19 pandemic led to some, but not many, developmental milestone delays in infants and young children

Apr 22, 2024

Few young adults could administer naloxone to reverse fentanyl overdose

Let us know if there is a problem with our content.

Use this form if you have come across a typo, inaccuracy or would like to send an edit request for the content on this page. For general inquiries, please use our contact form . For general feedback, use the public comments section below (please adhere to guidelines ).

Please select the most appropriate category to facilitate processing of your request

Thank you for taking time to provide your feedback to the editors.

Your feedback is important to us. However, we do not guarantee individual replies due to the high volume of messages.

E-mail the story

Your email address is used only to let the recipient know who sent the email. Neither your address nor the recipient's address will be used for any other purpose. The information you enter will appear in your e-mail message and is not retained by Medical Xpress in any form.

Newsletter sign up

Get weekly and/or daily updates delivered to your inbox. You can unsubscribe at any time and we'll never share your details to third parties.

More information Privacy policy

Donate and enjoy an ad-free experience

We keep our content available to everyone. Consider supporting Science X's mission by getting a premium account.

E-mail newsletter

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

Publications
Our Methods
Short Reads
Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

True crime podcasts are popular in the U.S., particularly among women and those with less formal education

Actors Selena Gomez, Martin Short and Steve Martin are filmed on the set of Only Murders in the Building in New York City in February 2022. The TV show focuses on three strangers brought together by their love of true crime podcasts. (James Devaney/GC Images via Getty Images)

True crime stands out as the most common topic of top-ranked podcasts in the United States, according to a new Pew Research Center study . So who, exactly, listens to true crime podcasts?

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to explore U.S. adults’ views of and experiences with podcasts as a part of the news and information landscape.

To examine the ways Americans get news and information in a digital age, the Center surveyed 5,132 U.S. adults from Dec. 5 to 11, 2022. Everyone who completed the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

In the questionnaire, U.S. adults who said they are currently listening to at least one podcast were asked in an open-ended question to write in the name of the podcast that they listen to most. If respondents answered with the names of more than one podcast, only the first one was coded. In total, 1,563 open-end responses were coded.

Here are the questions used in the survey, along with responses, and its methodology .

As part of the study, the Center also took a close look at key characteristics of top-ranked podcasts. Researchers identified these top podcasts by analyzing daily lists of the top 200 podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify from April 1 to Sept. 30, 2022. The average chart position of each podcast that appeared on either list was calculated, and the top 300 podcasts from each site were included as top podcasts. Researchers identified 451 top podcasts by combining these lists so that podcasts that were among the top 300 on both sites were not counted twice.

A team of trained researchers then analyzed these 451 podcasts to determine podcast affiliation, topic, format and other key characteristics of each podcast. Additional data on episode length and frequency was analyzed after collecting data on all episodes published in 2022 through the Spotify and Apple Podcasts application programming interface.

Here are the detailed tables for this analysis of 451 top-ranked podcasts, and the methodology .

Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. This is the latest analysis in Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age, a research program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Overall, 34% of U.S. adults who have listened to a podcast in the past year say they regularly listen to podcasts about true crime, according to a 2022 Center survey . But some demographic groups are more likely than others to do so:

Among U.S. podcast listeners, women are almost twice as likely as men to regularly listen to true crime podcasts (44% vs. 23%).
Podcast listeners with less formal education are more likely than those with higher levels of education to listen to shows about true crime. Looking at podcast listeners who have a high school diploma or less, 45% regularly listen to true crime podcasts. A third of podcast listeners with some college education say the same, as do 27% of those who have at least a bachelor’s degree. This pattern persists even when accounting for age.
While women are more likely to listen to true crime podcasts overall, women with lower levels of formal education are the most likely to do so. A majority (57%) of women with a high school diploma or less say they regularly listen to true crime podcasts, compared with 34% of men with the same education level and 36% of women with a college degree.
Younger podcast listeners are more likely than the oldest listeners to report tuning in to shows about true crime. Among U.S. podcast listeners ages 18 to 29, 41% regularly listen to true crime podcasts. This compares with 15% of listeners ages 65 and older.

A bar chart showing that across education levels, women are more likely to listen to true crime podcasts than men.

The Center’s new study finds that true crime is the most common topic among top-ranked podcasts – defined as those with the highest average daily rankings on Apple’s and Spotify’s lists of top podcasts in a six-month period in 2022. Almost a quarter (24%) of these top podcasts are primarily about true crime.

True crime podcasts are often investigations into murders, scandals and other criminal events. Serial, which helped to popularize the genre , is a series that provides in-depth investigations into particular crimes or events. Due to its popularity, Serial is often credited for drawing national attention to the conviction of Adnan Syed.

Other top-ranked podcasts in this genre include 20/20, Crime Junkie, Dateline NBC, and My Favorite Murder. Crime Junkie and Dateline NBC are among the most popular podcasts cited by podcast listeners who gave a name for the show they tune in to most – 1% named each of these podcasts.

While true crime is the most common topic among top-ranked podcasts, it is not the most popular topic Americans report listening to, according to the Center’s recent survey . About a third of podcast listeners in the United States (34%) say they regularly listen to podcasts about true crime.

Other topics – such as comedy (47%) and entertainment, pop culture and the arts (46%) – are more popular than true crime.

While the Center’s survey did not specifically ask why podcast listeners turn to specific topics such as true crime, we can look at the reasons that people said they listen to podcasts in general – and among those who said the podcast they listen to most is true crime.

Of those who said their main podcast is about true crime, the most common major reasons for listening were for entertainment (85%) and to have something to listen to while doing something else (84%). They were less likely to cite reasons like learning, hearing other people’s opinions, or staying up to date about current events.

Note: Here are the detailed tables for this analysis of 451 top-ranked podcasts, and the methodology . Here are the questions used for this analysis, and our survey methodology .

Audio, Radio & Podcasts
Entertainment

Sarah Naseer is a research assistant focusing on news and information research at Pew Research Center

Jane Doe is a a research analyst focusing on social and demographic research at Pew Research Center

Most Top-Ranked Podcasts Bring On Guests

An audio tour through america’s top-ranked podcasts, q&a: how we used large language models to identify guests on popular podcasts, news platform fact sheet, for national radio day, key facts about radio listeners and the radio industry in the u.s., most popular.

1615 L St. NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 | Media Inquiries

Research Topics

Age & Generations
Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Economy & Work
Family & Relationships
Gender & LGBTQ
Immigration & Migration
International Affairs
Internet & Technology
Methodological Research
News Habits & Media
Non-U.S. Governments
Other Topics
Politics & Policy
Race & Ethnicity
Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Terms & Conditions

Cookie Settings

Reprints, Permissions & Use Policy

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

NCJRS Virtual Library

Cross-language validation of the scale of economic self-efficacy for spanish-speaking survivors of intimate partner violence.

This article presents a study that tested the psychometric properties of the Scale of Economic Self-Efficacy across Spanish- and English-speaking intimate partner violence survivors; it discusses the research methodology, findings, and implications for policymakers and future research.

Economic empowerment interventions contribute to increased financial security and independence among intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors. Improving economic self-efficacy is influential in improving financial behaviors. However, reliable and valid measures are necessary to conduct rigorous evaluations of these interventions. Specifically, a tool to properly evaluate the economic self-efficacy needs of Spanish-speaking IPV survivors is crucial but not yet available. This study tested the psychometric properties of the Scale of Economic Self-Efficacy (ESE) across Spanish and English-speaking IPV survivors, guided by these research questions: (a) Does the proposed one-factor model for the Scale of ESE fit both Spanish and English-speaking analytic samples well? (b) What are the psychometric properties of the Scale of ESE for both the Spanish and English-speaking samples? and (c) Can the Scale of ESE be used to measure ESE among both Spanish and English-speaking samples without bias? A single-group confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), followed by a series of nested multi-group CFAs were conducted using data from 415 Spanish- and English- speaking IPV survivors living in the US and Puerto Rico. Findings demonstrate that the one-factor Scale of ESE is a valid and reliable scale for assessing economic self-efficacy within and across Spanish and English-speaking IPV survivors. Results provide researchers with evidence to use the Scale of ESE to conduct rigorous evaluations of economic empowerment interventions for Spanish-speaking IPV survivors. The Scale of ESE also has the potential to aid in policymaking as policymakers and funders seek evidence for financial empowerment program decisions. (Published Abstract Provided)

Additional Details

810 Seventh Street NW , Washington , DC 20531 , United States

Energy Smart Appliances: launch of an EU Code of Conduct for interoperability

First 10 manufacturers commit to the EU Code of Conduct which aims to ensure interoperability of home appliances. This would contribute to a greater demand-side flexibility of households and help achieve a more stable and optimised power grid.

As renewables’ penetration renders the energy supply in the EU increasingly decentralised and reliant on variable resources, demand-side flexibility offered by households gains importance for ensuring the development and operation of the power grid at lowest costs for consumers.

Energy smart appliances (ESA) in homes enable consumers to shift electricity use depending on the preferences and other parameters, contributing to the stability of the power grid, or potentially lowering the electricity bill of the household. An example is running a heat pump or turning on a dishwasher when renewable generation is most abundant, whilst still delivering the service expected by the consumer (e.g. certain minimum temperatures, or to finish a wash cycle before a certain time).

Any energy control unit can usually manage automatically the energy consumption of an ESA. Unlike non-interoperable appliances, which have specific control systems and services depending on their manufacturers, interoperable ESA should offer common services and exchange the same information to enable them. These will allow for instance enabling a flexible start of a device or simply limiting its consumption regardless of the manufacturer.

To bring about cross-brand interoperability of widely used ESA, the JRC and the Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy developed a Code of Conduct (CoC) together with manufacturers. This voluntary initiative aims to increase the number of interoperable energy smart appliances placed on the EU market.

The objective of the Code of Conduct is to define common demand flexibility services and the information that needs to be exchanged to enable them, at a semantic level that can work even where different technical communication protocols are used by manufacturers.

Product manufacturers (from the products in scope of this version), industry associations, NGOs, academia, and Member States were all involved in the process of creating this first version of the Code of Conduct. While the commitment is taken by the manufacturers of the products in scope, other relevant actors of the energy system are asked to acknowledge this Code of Conduct.

This first version of the Code of Conduct covers a range of appliances that have an energy label:

white goods: washing machines, tumble driers, washer-driers, dishwashers;
heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), including heat pumps and water heating.

It also includes the following “use cases”:

flexible start
power consumption monitoring
limitation of power consumption
incentive table-based power consumption management
manual operation (provision of necessary information in case of user driven manual operation of ESA)

At the time of the launch, we have received the commitment of 10 companies producing appliances in the scope of this first version, namely Arçelik, Clivet, Daikin, Electrolux, Miele, Mitsubishi Electric, Panasonic, Vaillant Group, Vestel and Viessmann . The manufacturers have committed to develop interoperable connected products within a year . In addition, a Home Energy Management System manufacturer, GEO, has committed to support compliant ESA through their products.

Besides being beneficial for consumers, products that comply with the Code of Conduct would ultimately help several objectives through the increase of demand side flexibility, such as to improving the environmental impact of energy use over the whole energy system, contributing to grid stability and security of supply, and economical optimisation.

research topic for language

IMAGES

VIDEO

COMMENTS

211 Research Topics in Linguistics To Get Top Grades

Linguistics Research Paper Topics

Sociolinguistic Research Topics

Language Research Topics

Linguistics Essay Topics

List of Research Topics in English Language

English Research Paper Topics for College Students

Finding Linguistics Hard To Write About?

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

130+ Original Linguistics Research Topics: Ideas To Focus On

Creative Language Research Topics

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

55 Top-Rated Research Topics in Linguistics For an A+

What are the Linguistics Research Topics?

How To Write Linguistic Topics For Your Dissertation

History of Language Research Topics

Argumentative College Linguistic Research Topics

Linguistics Research Topics – Tough Questions

Sociolinguistic Research Topics

Interesting Topics in Linguistics

Linguistics Paper Topics on Politics

Linguistics Research Paper Topics on Semantics

Linguistic Topics on Translation

Interesting Linguistics Topics on Language Disorders

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Language and linguistics articles from across Nature Portfolio

Research on flipped classrooms in foreign language teaching in Chinese higher education

Analysing and evaluating the bilingual adaptation of English graded readers in China: A social semiotic multimodal discourse study

Does simplification hold true for machine translations? A corpus-based analysis of lexical diversity in text varieties across genres

ChatGPT and the digitisation of writing

Translation, transmission and indigenization of Christianity in nineteenth-century China: south-to-north travel of the disguised San Zi Jing by Medhurst

News and Comment

Is boredom a source of noise and/or a confound in behavioral science research?

Exploration of the social and philosophical underpinning of ‘the patient’—what this means for people with a long-term condition

Approaching the neuroscience of language

Neural evidence of word prediction

The usefulness of ChatGPT for psychotherapists and patients

Quick links

Applied Linguistics Research: Current Issues, Methods, and Trends

Access this chapter

Author information

Corresponding author

Editor information

Copyright information

About this chapter

Download citation

Share this chapter

100+ Compelling Linguistics Research Topics for University Students

How To Choose the Right Linguistics Research Topics?

Interesting Topics in Linguistics

Stimulating Research Paper Topics In Sociolinguistics

Interesting Research Topics in Applied Linguistics

Interesting Research Topics in Semantics

Topics For Linguistics Essays

Computational Linguistics Research Topics

By Alex Brown

100+ Linguistic Topics for Excellent Research Papers

Linguistics Research Paper: Definition, Explanation, Examples

Introduction

Methodology

Choosing A Good Linguistic Topic Isn’t Hard – Here’s How To Do It

Top 15 Brilliant Psycholinguistics Topics

15 Interesting Sociolinguistics Topic Ideas

15 Good Applied Linguistics Topics

15 Computational Linguistics Research Paper Topics

15 Engaging Comparative Linguistics Research Paper Topics

15 Interesting Historical Linguistics Topic Ideas

15 Compelling Stylistics Linguistics Research Paper Topics

Having Problems with Your Paper? Our Experts Are Available 24/7

Read the essay prompt carefully

Choose a topic

Conduct comprehensive research

Develop a thesis

Design an outline

Writing process

Thorough editing and proofreading

A life lesson in Romeo and Juliet taught by death

Ethical Research Paper Topics

Art Research Paper Topics

Writing custom essays & research papers since 2008