NEUROLINGUISTICS

Abstract

Neurolinguistics is the study of language-brain relations. Its final goal is the comprehension and explanation of the neural bases for language knowledge and use. Neurolinguistics is by its nature an interdisciplinary enterprise, and straddles the borders between linguistics and other disciplines that are connected to the study of the mind/brain (mainly cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience). When approached from the point of view of the neurosciences, neurolinguistics focuses on how the brain behaves in language processes, both in healthy and pathological conditions; conversely, from a linguistics standpoint, neurolinguistics aims at clarifying how language structures can be instantiated in the brain, i.e. how patterns and rules exhibited in human languages are represented and grounded in the brain. In addition, neurolinguistics has a fundamental clinical impact for assessment and treatment of patients suffering from aphasia and other language pathologies.The field was officially opened up by the nineteenth-century neurologist Paul Broca with his observations of the correlation between language disturbance and brain damage. Since then, over 100 years of investigation into the organization of language in the brain were based on a lesion-deficit approach, in a localizationist perspective. The significance of a brain area was deduced through observation of deficits following a lesion to that brain region, and the exact localization of the lesion was verified through post-mortem examination. The aphasiological era developed a functional model of language production and comprehension that highlighted the Jan-Ola Östman&JefVerschueren