A critical synthesis of over 150 years of research on the brain’s networks that enable us to communicate through language.

The neural architecture of language has been a hotly debated topic in neurology, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, and philosophy since the early 1800s. Is language separable from intelligence? Is it enabled by dedicated and localizable neural networks? Do we speak and understand with our left hemisphere? How did language emerge? Is language grounded in sensorimotor systems, or is it abstract and amodal? Will we ever have a clear picture of how syntax, the pinnacle of human linguistic prowess, is organized neurologically?

Wired for Words answers these questions and more. Gregory Hickok tells the stories behind the big ideas, revealing the source of both modern progress and persistent myths. Drawing on decades of research using tools and insights from neurology, functional imaging, neurosurgery, linguistics, psychology, and engineering, Hickok builds a new understanding of the neural architecture—the components and connection patterns—of the brain’s language system from sound to meaning to speech.Contents
Part 1 -- Preliminaries
1: What is Language?
2: The Dual Stream Brain
Part 2 -- The Klangs of Language
3: The Hidden Symmetry of Speech Perception
4: Left Brain, Right Brain: Wrong-Minded
5: Toward a Neural Architecture of Speech Perception
6: Cracking the Speech Code
Part 3 -- From Words to Sentences
7: Word Search
8: Where do you know what you know?
9: Telegrams and Sentence Monsters
Part 4 - -Talking Brains
10: The Sensory Theory of Speech Production
11: Beyond Broca
Part 5 -- The Big Picture
12: The Neural Architecture of Language
Appendix
ReferencesUS“Hickok’s book is essential reading for both novices and hardened experts in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and the neuropsychology of speech and language.”
—BiolinguisticsGregory Hickok is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Sciences and Language Science at UC Irvine where he serves as Chair of the Department of Language Science. He was the first elected Chair of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the author of The Myth of Mirror Neurons.