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Abstract

Neurolinguistics complements psycholinguistic approaches to study verbal communication by identifying the neural operations that underlie the uniquely human language faculty. Knowledge about the brain basis of language has increased so drastically that recent neurolinguistic models of sentence comprehension comprise the entire processing cascade from speech perception to the interpretation of an utterance. The current data suggest that sentence comprehension is initiated by bottom‐up mechanisms which are started early, are completed rapidly are unconscious and run fully automatically. These mechanisms, which are implemented in the left temporal cortex, allow for a fast and efficient categorization of acoustic‐phonological, semantic and syntactic information. Higher‐order computations of sentence‐level semantics and syntax in the left inferior frontal cortex is driven by top‐down processes, which occur relatively late and proceed relatively slowly compared with lower‐level comprehension, are consciously controllable and do not run entirely automatically. Dorsal and ventral white matter fiber tracts enable a signal exchange between these brain areas that is necessary to integrate all information into an interpretable concept.