use without Broca’s area

knowledge of the neuroanatomy of higher functions of the central nervous system: It is now possible to get a glimpse of the brain while it is in action. However, this progress would not have been possible without improved under-standing of the knowledge base and operations that under-lie complex behavior. Parallel to the greater precision of the technology, some progress has been made in our under-standing of the cognitive architecture that underlies certain behavioral domains. In the study of brain-language rela-tions, theoretical developments in linguistics have gone hand in hand with imaging, making a joint contribution to behavioral neurology. After several decades of the study of language and the brain from a linguistic angle, there is now a relatively dense body of facts that can be seriously evalu-ated. This target article will review central results and use them to motivate some novel conclusions about the repre-sentation of language in the human cerebral cortex. The discussion will revolve around the choice of unit of behav-ioral analysis and its theoretical import. An outlook on lan-guage derived from current linguistic theory can lead to a new and more precise picture of language and the brain. The old Connectionist school – led by Broca, Wernicke, and Lichtheim (see Lichtheim 1885, for a comprehensive exposition) and revived in our time by the late Norman Geschwind (e.g., 1970; 1979) – fortified belief in the exis-tence of cerebral language centers. As clinicians, these au-thors mostly emphasized the patients ’ communicative skills, viewing language as a collection of activities, practiced in the service of communication: speaking, listening, reading, writ