THE CHANGING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ANATOMIC AND COGNITIVE EXPLANATION IN THE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE

Changing trends in the approach to neurolinguistics are reviewed. We s uggest that these trends are marked by a distinct convergence between linguistic/cognitive and anatomic/physiological approaches to the stud y of aphasia. With respect to the former, we cite the refinement of an alysis of language symptoms and the introduction of experimental metho ds that reveal real-time aspects of language processing. With respect to the latter, we cite the technical advances in static and dynamic br ain imaging that have allowed the in vivo analysis of lesion sites in aphasic patients. and the identification of foci of metabolic activity during linguistic/cognitive tasks in normal brains. We cite recent im aging studies of category-specific lexical dissociations as examples o f the productive convergence of anatomic and technological advances to illuminate a particularly challenging problem.