Neurolinguistics

The origin of the discipline of neurolinguistics as a systematic study of brain–language relation can be traced back to the contribution of Franz Joseph Gall in the late 18th century and those who had debated his theory of modularity of mental functions and their representations in the human brain (Figure 1).

Subsequently, localization of mental functions, including the faculty of language, became a hot topic of research. In the late 19th century, ideas related to the importance of the left cerebral hemisphere for language and speech began to emerge, although not without dissenting voices. Initial attempts were made to localize language/speech in specific brain structures, for instance, in 1861 Paul Broca hypothesized that articulated speech was localized in the left posterior inferior frontal cortex. Another significant ...