1 NEUROLINGUISTICS: MIND, BRAIN, AND LANGUAGE David Kemmerer Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences; Department of Psychological Sciences Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA kemmerer@purdue.edu To appear as Chapter 19 in the following book: Allan, K. (Ed.) (2014). The Routledge Handbook of Linguistics. New York: Routledge. 1. Introduction The goal of neurolinguistics is to understand how the cognitive capacity for language is subserved by the biological tissue of the brain. This interdisciplinary field of research began in the mid 19 th century, and by the early 20 th century several basic aspects of the neural architecture of language had already been discovered, such as left-hemisphere dominance and the strong reliance of speech perception and production on certain regions in the temporal and frontal lobes. These initial insights came primarily from investigations of brain-damaged patients who displayed fairly consistent correlations between, on the one hand, particular patterns of impaired and preserved linguistic abilities, and on the other hand, particular patterns of lesioned and intact brain structures. But even though that first wave of neuropsychological exploration was of great historical importance, the value of the studies was limited by their lack of precision on both sides of the language-brain relationship. From the mid 20 th century up to the present, however, the whole field evolved quite dramatically for a variety of reasons, including the maturation of modern linguistics, the cognitive revolution in psychology, the emergence of computer science and artificial intelligence, and the invention and progressive refinement of numerous brain mapping methods. Due to these developments, neurolinguistics is now a vibrant, rapidly growing field in which researchers with different backgrounds frequently collaborate to conduct empirical and theoretical studies on diverse topics. The following synopsis begins by summarizing several kinds of cortical organization as well as the most commonly used brain mapping methods. It then provides a selective review of recent hypotheses and findings about the neural representation and processing of spoken word forms, printed word forms, word meanings, and sentences. Although some of the most well- supported contemporary perspectives are covered, space limitations only allow a small amount of material to be included, far less than is actually available in the relevant literature. Further information can be found in the references listed under “Recommended reading.” 2. Cortical organization Although subcortical structures such as the thalamus, basal ganglia, and cerebellum certainly contribute to language, the most complex computations are carried out in the cerebral cortex, which is the convoluted outer mantle of the brain. The cortex contains approximately 30 billion neurons, and because each of them makes contact with at least 1,000 other cells, the whole system constitutes a massively interactive information processing matrix that is adaptively designed to support high-level mental functions.