Abstract
This chapter presents an overview of the neural basis of language. It begins with a discussion of aspects of animal communication systems and their neural basis, highlighting the significant functional and neural differences between these systems and human language, and also pointing to some similarities between features of the neural organization for these functions and the neural organization for human language. It then reviews human lesion-deficit and functional neuroimaging studies of language, first providing an inventory of neural structures that have been related to language and then examining the organization of the major language area, the left perisylvian cortex, in more detail. Two language functions—word recognition and one aspect of sentence comprehension—that differ in the closeness of their relation to sensory stimuli are contrasted, and the possibility that different language functions are supported by different types of brain organization is raised.
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