“Postgenomic thinking ” refers to the serious conceptual work that molecular biologists know they will soon have to do, once they have fully sequenced the human genome and still do not understand how it works. A similar fate faces those of us who study brain and language: In the next few years, we will have to engage in “postphrenological thinking, ” formulating a new view of brain organization for language to replace the 19th-century perspective that has held sway for most of the 20th century. In both cases, the need for a new conceptual framework is the product of technological breakthroughs. In molecular biology, advances in gene sequencing have brought the goal of genomic description much closer than anyone would have predicted a few years ago. In cognitive neuroscience, new neural imaging techniques have given many investigators a golden

Booth, James R., Brian Macwhinney, Keith R. Thulbom, Kelley Sacco, James Voyvodic, and Heidi M. Feldman. Functional Organization of Activation Patterns in Children: Whole Brain fMRI Imaging During Three Different Cognitive Tasks. Progress in Neuro-Psychophamacol & Biol. Psychiat. 1999, 23, pp. 669-682. 01999 Elsevier Science Inc. 1. Patterns of brain activation were measured with whole brain echo-planar functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at 3.0 Tesla in healthy children and in one child with a lefthemisphere encephalomalacic lesion as sequellae from early stroke. 2. Three cognitive tasks were used: auditory sentence comprehension, verb generation to line drawings, and mental rotation of alphanumeric stimuli. 3. There was evidence for significant bilateral activation in all three cognitive tasks for the healthy children. Their patterns of activation were consistent with previous functional imaging studies with adults. 4. The child with a left-hemisphere stroke showed evidence of homologous organization in the nondamaged hemisphere. Kevwords: cognitive processing, functional magnetic resonance imaging, pediatric, stroke Abbreviations: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

Given mounting evidence that auditory, visual and/or motor dysfunction may not cause developmental dyslexia, but are often associated with it, the present paper proposes a new neurological model of dyslexia which explains how a specific phonological deficit might arise, and sometimes occur together with a more general sensorimotor syndrome. Based on a review of the neurology of dyslexia, the model specifies that: 1) Genetically determined focal cortical anomalies in specific left perisylvian language areas are the underlying cause of the phonological deficit; 2) This phonological deficit is the primary cause of reading impairment; 3) Under certain hormonal conditions during gestation, these cortical anomalies induce secondary disruption in sensory pathways, notably in the thalamus. The disruption may even extend to further areas, like the posterior parietal cortex and even the cerebellum; 4) When this happens, the individual affected displays one or several components of a sensorimotor syndrome, which may in some cases aggravate the reading impairment. The model generalises to specific language impairment and possibly to other domain-specific developmental disorders, each particular disorder being characterised by the specific location of the brain anomalies.

sensitivity in children with early focal brain injury and children with specific language impairment

center at the University of California, San Diego that unites the efforts of fields such as Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Computer Science, Sociology, and Philosophy, all who share an interest in language. We feature papers related to language and cognition (distributed via the World Wide Web) and welcome response from friends and colleagues at UCSD as well as other institutions. Please visit our web site at

THIS BOOK BEGAN with a discussion of the psychological debate over the origins of knowledge. Central to that debate is the definition of the concept of innateness. Nativists define innate concepts as those that are acquired or available in the absence of learning. Recent constructivist accounts have attempted to define a level of innate representation that might plausibly emerge in the absence of input and rely entirely on organism-intrinsic factors. The difficulty with both of these accounts lies in the failure to provide a biologically feasible account of precisely what it means for something to be innate. One argument that has been voiced by some psychologists is that defining biological feasibility of an innate factor is the job of the biologist. Psychological models provide characterizations of sensory, motor, perceptual, cognitive, and social abilities, and although they assume that biological systems underpin behavior, the job of the psychologist is ultimately to explain behavior, not biology. It is true that the proper focus of the psychologist is psychology. However, the essential