ABSTRACT
Although studies of bird song and primate communication have contributed to knowledge of the biological bases for communication, human language represents so significant an advance beyond these systems that animal models have thus far provided little understanding of its functional or anatomical organization. Until the recent development of methods for imaging ongoing brain activity, the study of language-brain relationships drew primarily on associations between lesion sites and language deficits in brain damaged individuals. 1 These are, of course, accidents of nature, not subject to the controls that can be exercised over experimental materials. In particular, the lesions of patients who manifest roughly similar deficits are subject to a good deal of variability (for examples, see Kertesz, 1979). Nevertheless, the functional perturbations can often be quite specific, and studies of individuals with acquired language impairments have contributed much of what we know about the organization of language in the brain. Although less
