Neurolinguistics is the study of how language is represented in the brain: that is, how and where our brains store our knowledge of the language (or languages) that we speak, understand, read, and write, what happens in our brains as we acquire that knowledge, and what happens as we use it in our everyday lives.
Neurolinguistics is the branch of linguistics that analyzes the language impairments that follow brain damage in terms of the principles of language structure. The term “neurolinguistics” is neutral about the linguistic theory it refers to, but any linguistically based approach to aphasia therapy is based on the principle that language has an internal organization that can be described by a system of rules. The neurolinguistics approach stresses the role of language in aphasia and analyzes it according to principles of theoretical linguistics.
The first linguistically based typology of aphasic impairments is probably that of Roman Jakobson (1964), although Alajouanine and colleagues (1939, 1964) had already stressed the role of some linguistic phenomena in aphasia. Many authors have underlined the importance of linguistic theory for aphasia therapy (Hatfield, 1972; MacMahon, 1972; Hatfield and Shewell, 1983; Lesser, 1989; Miller, 1989), but linguistic analyses were not carried out in great detail until interest in aphasia expanded beyond the field of neurology to disciplines such as linguistics, speech−language pathology, and psychology.
