Back to the future: reclaiming aphasia from cognitive neurolinguistics.

The study of language organization and the brain has in many ways suffered from an embarrassment of riches. Since the early 1960s when the first applications of experimental psychological methods and theory started to appear in studies of aphasic language (e.g., Goodglass & Gleason, 1960), there have been literally thousands of papers published based on the perspectives of cognitive psychology, linguistics, and clinical science. While the methods and logic of experimental psychology were originally adopted to help explain the phenomenology of aphasia, the 1990s brought a radical shift in the relationship between experimental psychology and aphasia; aphasiological phenomena have become part of the ‘‘data’’ to test linguistic or cognitive theory. The result of this paradigmatic shift has been that much of the clinical and biological context of aphasic symptoms has become an epistemological orphan, left behind by the natural focus of normal psychological theory. Though this narrowing of focus and use of modern experimental meth-