The Neurocognition of Language.

The title of this book conveys its theme neatly, although I imagine there may have been considerable debate on what the best title should have been for this cross-disciplinary work. It reflects the current move away from the ultra-cognitive neuropsychology approach to language and the brain, with its highly focused emphasis on the functional basis of language disorders, and a de-emphasizing of anatomical considerations. A great many boxes and arrows were drawn on the basis of how language processing broke down after brain lesions, with only a vague idea of what they represented in anatomical terms. The reason for this was partly the lack of an animal model, which meant that research had to make use of what the editors describe as `experiments of nature' in the form of attempting to map patients' functional lesions onto anatomical lesions. This procedure was necessarily less than precise, because patients' lesions are never as neat and circumscribed as those produced with laboratory animals. However, much to the distress of some of our colleagues, advances in neural imaging technology have lead to a change in the situation. The content of this book reflects such a change. Much of the research summarized features not only functional MRI (fMRI) and PET scanning, but also data from event-related potentials (ERP) and event-related fields (ERF), so that the temporal …