The Neurocognition of Language is the first critical overview of the cognitive neuroscience of language, one of the fastest-moving and most exciting areas in language research today. And it is a necessity for anyone requiring a summary of our current understanding of the relation between language and the brain. It brings together human language experts who discuss the representations and structures of language as well as the cognitive architectures that underlie speaking, listening, and reading. In addition to valuable reviews of existing brain imaging literature on word and sentence processing and contributions from brain lesion data, this book provides a basis for future brain imaging research. It even explains the prospects and problems of brain imaging techniques for the study of language, presents some of the most recent and promising analytic procedures for relating brain imaging data to the higher cognitive functions, and contains a review of the neuroanatomical structure of Broca's language area. Uniquely interdisciplinary, this book offers researchers and students in cognitive neuroscience with state-of-the-art reviews of the major language functions, while being of equal interest to researchers in linguistics and language who want to learn about language's neural bases.

"This book is a comprehensive review of language theory, nicely integrated wtih evidence of subvervient neural architecture gleaned from neuroimaging. It is a valuable resource for someone seeking an integrated overview of neurocognitive theories of language." --Brown

Contributors

Section 1: Introductions

1. The cognitive neuroscience of language: challenges and future directions, Colin M. Brown and Peter Hagoort

2. Functional neuroimaging in cognitive neuroscience, Michael D. Rugg

3. The representational structures of the language faculty and their interactions, Ray Jackendoff

Section 2: The cognitive architectures of language

4. Producing spoken language: a blueprint of the speaker, Willem J. M. Levelt

5. Comprehending spoken language: a blueprint of the listener, Anne Cutler and Charles Clifton, Jr.

6. Comprehending written language: a blueprint of the reader, Charles A. Perfetti

Section 3: The neurocognitive architectures of language

7. The neural architecture underlying the processing of written and spoken word forms, Cathy Price, Peter Indefrey, and Miranda van Turennout

8. Clues to the functional and neural architecture of word meaning, Eleanor M. Saffran and Alexandra Sholl

9. The neurocognition of syntactic processing, Peter Hagoort, Colin M. Brown, and Lee Osterhout

Section 4: Language from a neurobiological perspective

10. Broca's language area from a neuroanatomical and developmental perspective

11. Functional integration: methods for assessing interactions among neuronal systems using brain imaging, Christian Buchel, Chris Frith, and Karl Friston

12. Current approaches to mapping language in electromagnetic space, Marta Kutas, Kara D. Federmeier, and Martin I. Sereno

Index