ABSTRACT
The field of neurolinguistics––i.e., the study of how language is processed and represented in the human brain––finds itself at the intersection of the fields of neuroscience, linguistics and cognitive science more generally. The history of neurolinguistics can be traced back as far as the 1860s with Paul Broca’s seminal observations and descriptions of patients with speech impairments caused by brain lesions to the posterior inferior frontal gyrus. This region later became known as Broca’s area, one of the most studied language-related brain regions (Dronkers, Plaisant, Iba-Zizen & Cabanis 2007). While the field has continued to gain insight into how the brain processes language throughout its history, it has been revolutionized in the last forty years as a result of developments in neuroimaging techniques (Ingram 2007). The vast majority of this recent work has examined language processing in monolingual speakers (see, for example, reviews by Poeppel & Hickok 2004 and Ross 2010), and has resulted in a rich body of literature which includes the investigation of a number of issues, including the time-course of both semantic and syntactic language processing (Friederici 2002), the neural correlates underlying semantic processing (Binder, Desai, Graves & Conant 2009), as well as how words are recognized (Lee & Federmeier 2012), comprehended (Kaan & Swaab 2002) and produced (Indefrey 2011).
