Presented at the Third Dual Congress on Psychiatry and the Neurosciences
Athens, 16–19 October 2008

For most people, language is the primary means of communication. For some philosophers of mind, language is the substrate of thought. For linguists, language is an abstract system of relations and operations. For cognitive psychologists, language is a set of processes and representations, roughly mapping to words and things we do with them such as producing and understanding sentences. The functional neuroimaging of “language” is no less ambiguous or multi-faceted. Oral and spoken language may be broken down into widely accepted expressive and receptive subcomponents such as signal (speech or print), phonology, syntax, words, and meanings. Neuroimaging studies localize many aspects of language to the brain surface with moderate or good consistency. However, the interpretation of this localization is far from clear and largely dependent on theory, while standard neurological caricatures of language are outdated and oversimplified. In this presentation, I highlight the role of cognitive and linguistic theory in producing and interpreting neuroimaging data on language function, claiming that the primary benefit of localization serves theoretical interpretation. I discuss the notion of "language areas" in the brain, using converging evidence from lesion and imaging studies, to show that they are neither well specified nor restricted to language functions.