Brain and Language Specialty: Insights from Aphasiology and Neuroimaging

Abstract

Scientific interest in the investigation of language and its neural correlates has always centered on the possibility of pinpointing the location of language in the brain with the assumption that specific areas of the brain could be dedicated to specific language components and processes. A central question in current neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic research that has been thoroughly discussed over the last few decades is whether certain linguistic abilities result from dedicated brain areas each specialized for specific kinds of linguistic representations and processes or whether these abilities are more accurately described in terms of interactions among different linguistic levels distributed across multiple brain regions. An outlook on language derived from current research suggests that language specialty as a distinctly human cognitive faculty lies in being supported by distributed neural structures that interact efficiently with so many domain-general abilities, functions, and information sources rather than in being located in a dedicated set of cognitive neural structures. This paper is a reflection of the insights into language in the brain based on findings obtained from neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies that support this perspective. The paper goes on plead that with current developments in linguistic theory, as a model of human knowledge of language, and some powerful methodological advances in cognitive neuroscience may lead to a new and more precise image of the functional organization of language in the brain.