Neurolinguistic and neuropsychological evidences for functionally organized language networks

Through selective review of current neuropsychological and experimental studies using neuroimaging modalities, this chapter aims to highlight some areas where 'neuro-' evidences may be relevant for theoretical investigations in functional linguistics. The picture-naming task is widely used both in clinical settings as a component of language assessments and in psycholinguistic and neuroimaging studies. The large-scale network perspective is important for functional linguistics generally because it grounds the neural representation of language in a cognitive architecture that theoretically should inherit properties common to other similar networks. The 'phonological' network in the scene description study also appears 'specialized' for some kind of sound – motor representation. In their exposition of the history of neuroscience, Catani and Sandrone observe that the images of the brain in a particular period tend to rely on metaphors that are grounded in the most striking and ubiquitous technology of the era.