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A recurring question in neuroimaging studies of spoken language is whether speech is processed largely bilaterally, or whether the left hemisphere plays a more dominant role (cf., Hickok and Poeppel, 2007; Rauschecker and Scott, 2009). Although questions regarding underly-ing mechanisms are certainly of interest, the discussion unfortunately gets side-tracked due to the imprecise use of the word “speech”: by being more explicit about the type of cognitive and linguis-tic processing to which we are referring it may be possible to reconcile many of the disagreements present in the literature