Rethinking the neurological basis of language
Rethinking
the neurological basis of language
Pages 997-1042
Laurie
A. Stowe, Marco Haverkort and Frans Zwarts
Lingua
Volume 115, Issue 7
,
July 2005,
Pages 997-1042
Abstract
Functional neuroimaging, within 10 years, has
produced evidence which leads us to question a number of the standard
assumptions about the areas which are necessary and sufficient for
language processing. Although neuroimaging evidence has corroborated
much neuropsychological data, it forces a revision of a number of the
standard interpretations of those data and some traditionally accepted
notions must be totally discarded. We will provide an overview of some
issues which have arisen in these years, giving examples from a number
of laboratories and illustrating with experiments of our own. The
circumstances under which the left posterior temporal lobe (Wernicke’s
area) and the left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca’s area) are activated
are reviewed, and several views of how they contribute to language
processing are considered in the light of this evidence. Further
evidence for the contribution of a number of other areas to language
comprehension are reviewed, including the anterior temporal lobe, the
cerebellum, the left superior median frontal lobe, the anterior insula
and the left inferior temporal occipital junction. Further we discuss
some of the conditions under which the right hemisphere contributes to
language processing. We will conclude by discussing the implications of
this research for the concept of modularity in the sense of Fodor
[Modularity of Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1983].