Читать книгу The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition - Zoltan Dornyei - Страница 9

The previous section briefly mentioned the powerful contemporary drive of incorporating the methods and findings of neuroscience into more traditional approaches such as psycholinguistics and, in this sense, neurolinguistics can be seen as a linguistic companion to psycholinguistics. Neurolinguistics shares similar objectives with cognitive linguistics but draws on neuropsychology rather than cognitive psychology as the main source of psychological knowledge. In his comprehensive summary of the neurolinguistics of bilingualism, Paradis (2004) explains that the term ‘neurolinguistics’ was first used by French neurologist Henry Hécaen in the late 1960s, to denote a discipline that was to bridge a gap between the neurosciences (neurology, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neurochemistry) and human communication (linguistics and psycholinguistics). Originally, the main emphasis of the field was on studying verbal deficits resulting from cortical lesions (i.e. aphasia) and therefore neurolinguistics was initially closely associated with language pathology. For this reason, some scholars (e.g. Ahlsén 2006) put the genesis of neurolinguistics as being 1861, when Paul Broca presented his seminal findings on what was to be called ‘Broca aphasia’. (See Ch. 2 for more details.) Recently, neurolinguistics has extended its scope well beyond aphasia studies and embraced the whole new spectrum of neuroimaging techniques, thereby blending gradually into the cognitive neuroscience of language – see below.