The pursuit of brain–language relationships

The past century has been a time of many new developments in the fields of language and neuroscience. We have seen the growth of linguistics and the application of its theories to the study of aphasia. We have learned much about neurophysiology and neural structures and the mechanisms of brain injury and recovery. At the same time, the prevailing model concerning the brain areas that subserve language has changed relatively little. In this regard, we have tended to rely on nineteenth-century theories of language localiza-tion and have been reluctant to take advantage of our new methods and tech-nologies to explore additional brain regions, novel ideas, or alternative mod-els. It would be my hope for the next century of the new millenium that we would take advantage of these new tools and use them to broaden our per-spective regarding additional brain–language relationships and the integra-tion of these different brain areas in the processing of language. The traditional model still describes Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, and the arcuate fasciculus as the key structures involved in language. We believ