ABSTRACT
Language mediates between thoughts and motor commands in a speaker, and between acoustic or visuospatial signals and thoughts in a listener. This mediation takes place in the brain. The brain is the machine that takes sounds, letter strings, or hand shapes as input and somehow yields the phenomenological sense of understanding. The brain is also the machine that controls the mouth or the hand in sign language so as to generate a linguistic utterance. Understanding language is one of the major integrative acts at which the human brain excels. The brain must integrate different kinds of language representations, such as semantic, syntactic, phonological knowledge of words, and discourse information, in real time during the process of understanding and speaking. It is thus to the brain in action that electrophysiologists turn for answers to fundamental questions about the nature of language representations and operations on them, and about the relationships among language and other cognitive processes.
