Language processing, functional magnetic resonance imaging of

Functional imaging has now been used to study the neurobiology of language for more than 20 years. In this article, we review the current literature from functional magnetic resonance imaging in the areas of phonological processing, word comprehension, sentence processing, and discourse comprehension. While this literature confirms a major role of the classical perisylvian regions of the left hemisphere in language processing, it has become increasingly apparent that there are important contributions to language processing from a wide network of brain areas, including many regions in the right hemisphere, sensory–motor regions, and other areas – particularly in the nonperisylvian regions of the temporal and parietal lobes. Of particular recent interest has been the role of sensory and motor cortices in semantic representation and the integration between verbal and nonverbal information during communication.