Cognitive Neuroscience of Language – An Unabashedly Parochial Primer

The modern study of language is guided by four principal questions. First, what is it that you know when you know a language? Language is a system of knowledge, and characterizing that system of knowledge in the mature adult speaker is the domain of linguistics. Second, how is that knowledge acquired? Language acquisition research and psycholinguistics concern themselves with the range of questions surrounding how the initial state is transformed into the final state in the adult speaker, given the primary linguistic data that the learner is confronted with. Third, how is this knowledge of language deployed in comprehension and production? Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics concern themselves with these issues. Four, how does the brain form the basis for acquiring and processing language? What neural mechanisms instantiate knowledge of language? These issues lie in the domain of neurolinguistics, cognitive neuroscience of language, and computational neuroscience.