Neurolinguistics

NEUROLINGUISTICS
The coining of the term "neurolinguistics" has been attributed to Harry Whitaker, who founded the Journal of Neurolinguistics in 1985. Neurolinguistics is the science concerned with the neural mechanisms that control the comprehension, production and abstract knowledge of language; it was rooted in the 19th century. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics involvesmethods and theory from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, neurobiology, communication disorders, neuropsychology, and computer science. Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds, bringing along a variety of experimental techniques as well as widely varying theoretical perspectives. Much work in neurolinguistics is informed by models in psycholinguisticsand theoretical linguistics, and is focused on investigating how the biological structures in the brain can physically implement the cognitive and computational processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics propose are necessary in producing and comprehending language.
Neurolinguists attempt to elucidate how the brain physiologically handles language information, and to evaluate theplausibility of linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, using aphasiology (the study of linguistic deficits - aphasias- occurring as the result of brain damage), brain imaging, electrophysiology, and computer modeling. Aphasiology attempts to make predictions about what linguistic functions are carried out in which parts of the brain by analyzing what language abilities are affected when an individualincurs brain damage to a specific localization in the brain. Using language involves many kinds of knowledge and skill; some can be badly damaged while others remain in fair condition. People with aphasia have different combinations of things they can still do in an adult-like way plus things that they now do clumsily or not at all. Therapy can help them to regain lost skills and make the best useof remaining abilities. Adults who have had brain damage and become aphasic recover more slowly than children who have had the same kind of damage, but they continue to improve over decades if they have good language stimulation. People who have lost some or most of their language because of brain damage are not like children. Using language involves many kinds of knowledge and skill; some can bebadly damaged while others remain in fair condition. People with aphasia have different combinations of things they can still do in an adult-like way plus things that they now do clumsily or not at all. Therapy can help them to regain lost skills and make the best use of remaining abilities. Adults who have had brain damage and become aphasic recover more slowly than children who have had the samekind of damage, but they continue to improve over decades if they have good language stimulation.
Broca's area and Wernicke's area
One of the first people to draw a connection between a particular brain area and language processing was Paul Broca, a French surgeon who conducted autopsies on numerous individuals who had had speaking deficiencies, and found that most of them had brain damage (orlesions) on the left frontal lobe, in an area now known as Broca's area. Phrenologists had made the claim in the early 19th century that different brain regions carried out different functions and that language was mostly controlled by the frontal regions of the brain, but Broca's research was possibly the first to offer empirical evidence for such a relationship, and has been described asepoch-making and pivotal to the fields of neurolinguistics and cognitive science. Later, Carl Wernicke, after whom Wernicke's area is named, proposed that different areas of the brain were specialized for different linguistic tasks, with Broca's area handling the motor production of speech, and Wernicke's area handling auditory speech comprehension. The work of Broca and Wernicke established the field...