chapter 22Language and the Brain

Abstract

AbstractLet me begin with a little anecdote. When I came to MIT in 1979, I was full of the energy and proud of the data derived from my Ph.D. research. Very early on, actually during my first week at MIT, I was able to take part in a workshop and there I came to sit at a table next to a person whom I didn’t know, but whom I told all about my wonderful work in reading and writing, and this person said to me, “Why do you think this is interesting?” [laughter] And you guess who that person was. It was Noam Chomsky. As a result of this my entire career has focused on auditory language processing, and so in today’s talk I will discuss the brain basis of auditory language comprehension.