ABSTRACT
For centuries, opinions regarding the fundamental character of neural organization have swung between two often caricatured poles: a phrenological view (Fodor, 1983; Gall, 1810), where each sensorimotor and cognitive function is subserved by a single region of neural tissue, and an equipotential view (Goldstein, 1948; Lashley, 1950), where the functions of particular brain regions are not sharply defined, and contribute to multiple mental processes. Over the last 40 years, the field of language research has been particularly polarized by an analogous debate regarding mental organization, with both generative linguistics and psycholinguistics often taking an explicitly modular and often phrenological position (Grodzinsky, 2000; Mauner, Fromkin, & Cornell, 1993), in which mental processes are subserved in specific “loci” of information processing systems and/or specific brain regions. By contrast,
some psycholinguistic and neuropsychological research has moved away from this extreme position, but without resorting to a theory of equipotentiality. This alternative is consistent both with neurobiological notions of regional specialization as well as observed overlap in the regional responsibilities for high-level computations. This major revision, known as “embodied cognition,” reflects a change in the functional primitives used to characterize the mental processes produced by the brain.
