Until the last few years, linguists' interest
in the language of the neurologically impaired has been
primarily from two orientations: psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic.
The former has applied theories concerning the mental processing
of language, using acquired language disorders as a test
bed for exploring and expanding these theories. The latter
attempts to correlate language (disordered or not) with
functional lesion sites in the brain; it has recently received
a major boost from the technical developments of functional
brain imaging, but its main theoretical base remains that
of psycholinguistic processing.