The study of language has increasingly become an area of interdisciplinary interest. Not only is it studied by speech specialists and linguists, but by psychologists and neuroscientists as well, particularly in understanding how the brain processes meaning. This book is a comprehensive look at sentence processing as it pertains to the brain, with contributions from individuals in a wide array of backgrounds, covering everything from language acquisition to lexical and syntactic processing, speech pathology, memory, neuropsychology, and brain imaging.

Broca's region has been in the news ever since scientists realized that particular cognitive functions could be localized to parts of the cerebral cortex. Its discoverer, Paul Broca, was one of the first researchers to argue for a direct connection between a concrete behavior--in this case, the use of language--and a specific cortical region. Today, Broca's region is perhaps the most famous part of the human brain, and for over a century, has persisted as the focus of intense research and numerous debates. The name has even penetrated mainstream culture through popular science and the...