Preface

Summary

The purpose of this book is to present an introduction to the emerging fields of neurolinguistics and linguistic aphasiology. It seems to me that many students, whose backgrounds are restricted to neurology, psychology, speech pathology, linguistics, or artificial intelligence, do not find the study of language disorders and the neural correlates of language accessible because basic aspects of the other fields are not familiar to them. Many neurology students, who must deal with the clinical phenomena of aphasia, shy away from linguistic descriptions of these conditions, and students in linguistics and psychology often consider neurolinguistics tangential to the central questions of their disciplines. My goal in writing this text is, therefore, to provide a basis from which to approach the more technical texts and articles which constitute the field. I hope readers come away from this volume able to locate articles they may later read within the general framework of theory and observation that constitutes neurolinguistics, and with enough detail to allow them at least to begin to evaluate an article in this area.

The first major problem facing students who might be interested in neurolinguistics – the number of different disciplines, each with its own vocabulary and technical aspects, that are relevant – can be approached in several ways. I have tried to introduce concepts from neurology (especially neuroanatomy, but also neurophysiology), linguistics, psychology, and aphasiology in ways which simplify but do not misrepresent essential features of these disciplines. Rather than devoting separate chapters or appendices to this, I have incorporated the material into the text at points where it seemed logical to do so.