Neural Systems and Language Processing: Toward a Synthetic Approach

With the birth of a new century comes an opportunity to take stock and to consider the future as it is informed by the past. Research on the neural and biological bases of language has a rich but rather short history. Nonetheless, the findings have laid the groundwork for what will appear to others outside the field to be a natural evolutionary course. Within the field, however, the struggles may be a bit more difficult, as it will be necessary, even essential, to integrate new ways of thinking and new methodologies about the brain and language. And it this realization and integration of new directions that may be the biggest issue that we face in the new millennium. What are these new ways of thinking? Perhaps the greatest challenge for us will be to consider language beyond its structural/componential base. The past 30 or so years of research on the brain and language has focused on delineating aphasic deficits in terms of the structural components of language. This modular approach, considering language to be comprised of separable but interacting components including sound structure, lexical structure, syntactic structure, has allowed us to chart the patterns of language