Brain and Language 71, 160–163 (2000) doi:10.1006/brln.1999.2240, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on Back to the Future: Reclaiming Aphasia from Cognitive Neurolinguistics William Milberg Geriatric Neuropsychology Laboratory, Geriatric, Research, Education and Clinical Center (GRECC), Brockton/West Roxbury Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Boston; Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University; and Harold Goodglass Aphasia Research Center, Boston University and Sheila Blumstein Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University; and Harold Goodglass Aphasia Research Center, Boston University The study of language organization and the brain has in many ways suf- fered from an embarrassment of riches. Since the early 1960s when the first applications of experimental psychological methods and theory started to appear in studies of aphasic language (e.g., Goodglass & Gleason, 1960), there have been literally thousands of papers published based on the perspec- tives of cognitive psychology, linguistics, and clinical science. While the methods and logic of experimental psychology were originally adopted to help explain the phenomenology of aphasia, the 1990s brought a radical shift in the relationship between experimental psychology and aphasia; aphasio- logical phenomena have become part of the ‘‘data’’ to test linguistic or cog- nitive theory. The result of this paradigmatic shift has been that much of the clinical and biological context of aphasic symptoms has become an epistemo- logical orphan, left behind by the natural focus of normal psychological the- ory. Though this narrowing of focus and use of modern experimental meth- This research was supported in part by the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Research Service VA Merit Review Awards to William Milberg and NIH Grants NIDCD00314 to Brown University and NIDCD0081 to the Boston University School of Medicine. Address correspondence and reprint requests to William Milberg, Ph.D., GRECC (182), Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, 1400 VFW Parkway, West Roxbury, MA 02132. E-mail: wpm@bu.edu. 160 0093-934X/00 $35.00 Copyright  2000 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.