Neurolinguistics

This chapter summarizes some first neurolinguistic studies conducted in Persian, using patholinguistic data taken from monolingual and bilingual brain-damaged patients, as well as five first neuroimaging studies in healthy native speakers of Persian. The patholinguistic data are extracted from formal clinical linguistic assessments of a heterogeneous group of brain-damaged patients with different etiologies and brain lesion sites. The data are indicative of general agrammatic features of ‘syntactic simplification’ and ‘morphological regression’ reported in cross-language studies, along with language-particular agrammatic features in spoken and written modalities for Persian consequent to brain damage. The present patholinguistic data are also suggestive of a ‘non-unitary’ model of aphasia as a symptom complex phenomenon with disruptions of independent linguistic levels consequent to different lesion sites. The data are not supportive of independent production and comprehension language centres claimed in ‘classical model’ of brain and language but in support of new non-narrow localization brain–language models.