Introduction

Abstract

The purpose of this special issue of Linguistische Berichte is to provide a collection of representative papers on issues currently discussed in Linguistics and Cognitive Neuroscience. The collection represents a mixture of state-of-the-art research as well as of new experimental findings investigating grammatical and semantic processing in normal and neurologically-impaired speakers/hearers. A range of different methodologies are presented: representational issues of linguistic information in terms of levels of linguistic descriptions (e.g., trace theory or thematic roles) or in terms of linguistic units (e.g., semantically transparent derived words vs. semantically opaque derived words) are considered as well as processing issues of linguistic information in terms of psychological notions (e.g., automatic vs. controlled processing), in terms of neuropsychological notions (e.g., lexical dissociations), or even in terms of neurological notions (e.g., anatomical features).

The editorial work of this special issue was supported by a fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Feodor Lynen program VB2-FLF) to the guest editor. He is grateful to Allen I. Selverston for his invitation to work at the University of California, San Diego, and to Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey L. Elman and David Swinney for providing facilities in the Departments of Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Psychology.