Neuropsychology has presented a particularly formidable array of devel opments during recent years. The number of methods, theoretical ap proaches, and publications has been steadily increasing, permitting a step-by-step approach to a deeper understanding of the tremendously complex relationships existing between brain and behavior. This volume was planned as a collection of papers that, in one way or another, present new research and clinical perspectives or interpretations about brain-behavior relationships. Some chapters present new research in specific topics, others summarize the evidence for a particular the oretical position, and others simply review the area and suggest new perspectives of research. Consistent with the spirit in which the book was planned, the authors present and propose new avenues for developing neuropsychology and understanding the organization of cognitive activity. Part I is devoted to basic theoretical and technical approaches in studying brain organization of cognitive processes. Hanlon and Brown ("Microgenesis: Historical Review and Current Studies") present an over view of some clinical and experimental work from the standpoint of mi crogenetic theory. Microgenesis is considered to be the structural devel opment of a cognition through qualitatively different stages. The authors discuss the growing dissatisfaction with both the old center and pathway theories and the newer modular or componental accounts. They also ex plore how micro genesis can be extended to the interpretation of symp toms of brain damage in developing a structural model of hierarchic levels through which the process of cognitive function unfolds.

Language Functions and Brain Organization

Once signed languages are recognized as natural human languages, a world of exploration opens up. Signed languages provide a powerful tool for investigating the nature of human language and language processing, the relation between cognition and language, and the neural organization of language. The value of sign languages lies in their modality. Specifically, for perception, signed languages depend upon high-level vision and motion processing systems, and for production, they require the integration of motor systems involving the hands and face. These facts raise many questions: What impact does this different biological base have for grammatical systems? For online language processing? For the acquisition of language? How does it affect nonlinguistic cognitive structures and processing? Are the same neural systems involved? These are some of the questions that this book aims at addressing. The answers provide insight into what constrains grammatical form, language processing, linguistic working memory, and hemispheric specialization for language. The study of signed languages allows researchers to address questions about the nature of linguistic and cognitive systems that otherwise could not be easily addressed.

Drawing on a wide variety of modern and classical sources and multiple disciplines, this book presents hypothesizes about the relationship between human language and thought to brain specialization. The authors focus on aphasia-language disorder resulting from local brain damage and show that the clinical aspect represents not only loss of function of the damaged area, but also results from the interaction between damaged and intact areas of the brain.

Interaction between language and cognition remains an unsolved scientific problem. What are the differences in neural mechanisms of language and cognition? Why do children acquire language by the age of six, while taking a lifetime to acquire cognition? What is the role of language and cognition in thinking? Is abstract cognition possible without language? Is language just a communication device, or is it fundamental in developing thoughts? Why are there no animals with human thinking but without human language? Combinations even among 100 words and 100 objects (multiple words can represent multiple objects) exceed the number of all the particles in the Universe, and it seems that no amount of experience would suffice to learn these associations. How does human brain overcome this difficulty? Since the 19th century we know about involvement of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in language. What new knowledge of language and cognition areas has been found with fMRI and other brain imaging methods? Every year we know more about their anatomical and functional/effective connectivity. What can be inferred about mechanisms of their interaction, and about their functions in language and cognition? Why does the human brain show hemispheric (i.e., left or right) dominance for some specific linguistic and cognitive processes? Is understanding of language and cognition processed in the same brain area, or are there differences in language-semantic and cognitive-semantic brain areas? Is the syntactic process related to the structure of our conceptual world? Chomsky has suggested that language is separable from cognition. On the opposite, cognitive and construction linguistics emphasized a single mechanism of both. Neither has led to a computational theory so far. Evolutionary linguistics has emphasized evolution leading to a mechanism of language acquisition, yet proposed approaches also lead to incomputable complexity. There are some more related issues in linguistics and language education as well. Which brain regions govern phonology, lexicon, semantics, and syntax systems, as well as their acquisitions? What are the differences in acquisition of the first and second languages? Which mechanisms of cognition are involved in reading and writing? Are different writing systems affect relations between language and cognition? Are there differences in language-cognition interactions among different language groups (such as Indo-European, Chinese, Japanese, Semitic) and types (different degrees of analytic-isolating, synthetic-inflected, fused, agglutinative features)? What can be learned from sign languages? Rizzolatti and Arbib have proposed that language evolved on top of earlier mirror-neuron mechanism. Can this proposal answer the unknown questions about language and cognition? Can it explain mechanisms of language-cognition interaction? How does it relate to known brain areas and their interactions identified in brain imaging? Emotional and conceptual contents of voice sounds in animals are fused. Evolution of human language has demanded splitting of emotional and conceptual contents and mechanisms, although language prosody still carries emotional content. Is it a dying-off remnant, or is it fundamental for interaction between language and cognition? If language and cognitive mechanisms differ, unifying these two contents requires motivation, hence emotions. What are these emotions? Can they be measured? Tonal languages use pitch contours for semantic contents, are there differences in language-cognition interaction among tonal and atonal languages? Are emotional differences among cultures exclusively cultural, or also depend on languages? Interaction of language and cognition is thus full of mysteries, and we encourage papers addressing any aspect of this topic.

The best survey of cognitive linguistics available, this Handbook provides a thorough explanation of its rich methodology, key results, and interdisciplinary context. With in-depth coverage of the research questions, basic concepts, and various theoretical approaches, the Handbook addresses newly emerging subfields and shows their contribution to the discipline. The Handbook introduces fields of study that have become central to cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual mappings and construction grammar. It explains all the main areas of linguistic analysis traditionally expected in a full linguistics framework, and includes fields of study such as language acquisition, sociolinguistics, diachronic studies, and corpus linguistics. Setting linguistic facts within the context of many other disciplines, the Handbook will be welcomed by researchers and students in a broad range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, gesture studies, computational linguistics, and multimodal studies.

The only way we can convey our thoughts to another person is through verbal language. Does this imply that our thoughts ultimately rely on words? This text takes the contrary position, arguing that many possible 'languages of thought' play different roles in the life of the mind.