NEURAL ORGANIZATION AND PLASTICITY OF LANGUAGE

Powerful advances in neuroimaging techniques have added to and refined classical descriptions of the neurobiology of language in adults. Rec ent studies have employed these methodologies to study the nature and extent of plasticity of language-relevant aspects of cerebral organiza tion in adults, in early and late bilinguals and in people who have ac quired language through different modalities. Studies of children have documented dynamic shifts in cerebral organization over the course of language acquisition. Each of these different approaches has revealed constraints on the identity of the neural systems that mediate langua ge; these studies have also described the marked and specific effects of language experience on the organization of these systems.