Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Top 10 most important/influential papers in the neuroscience of language

Just curious what folks think are the most important/influential papers or monographs in the history of brain-language research. Here's 16 prominent and generally very highly cited papers off the top of our heads (in alphabetical order). DISCLAIMER: This list was generated based on only a few minutes of thought. It is not intended to be a complete listing of important papers. If we have omitted YOUR important paper, or your personal favorite most important paper, do not take offense. DO, however click 'comment' at the bottom of this entry and tell us which papers we've failed to include, or which of the papers listed below don't belong in the Top 10!

Binder, J. R., Frost, J. A., Hammeke, T. A., Cox, R. W., Rao, S. M., & Prieto, T. (1997). Human brain language areas identified by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Journal of Neuroscience, 17, 353-362.

Broca, P. (1861). Remarques sur le siège de la faculté du langage articulé; suivies d'une observation d'aphémie (perte de la parole). Bulletins de la Société Anatomique (Paris), 6, 330-357, 398-407.

Broca, P. (1865). Sur le siège de la faculté du langage articulé. Bulletins de la Société d'Anthropologie, 6, 337-393.

Caramazza, A., & Zurif, E. B. (1976). Dissociation of algorithmic and heuristic processes in sentence comprehension: Evidence from aphasia. Brain and Language, 3, 572-582.

Damasio, H., Grabowski, T. J., Tranel, D., Hichwa, R. D., & Damasio, A. R. (1996). A neural basis for lexical retrieval. Nature, 380, 499-505.

Dell, G. S., Schwartz, M. F., Martin, N., Saffran, E. M., & Gagnon, D. A. (1997). Lexical access in aphasic and nonaphasic speakers. Psychological Review, 104, 801-838.

Friederici, A. D. (2002). Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing. Trends Cogn Sci, 6, 78-84.

Geschwind, N. (1965). Disconnexion syndromes in animals and man. Brain, 88, 237-294, 585-644.

Grodzinsky, Y. (2000). The neurology of syntax: Language use without Broca's area. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 1-21.

Linebarger, M. C., Schwartz, M., & Saffran, E. (1983). Sensitivity to grammatical structure in so-called agrammatic aphasics. Cognition, 13, 361-393.

Näätanen, R., Lehtokoski, A., Lennes, M., Cheour, M., Huotilainen, M., Iivonen, A., Vainio, M., Alku, P., Ilmoniemi, R. J., Kuuk, A., Allik, J., Sinkkonen, J., & Alho, K. (1997). Language-specific phoneme representations revealed by electric and magnetic brain responses. Nature, 385, 432-434.

Petersen, S. E., Fox, P. T., Posner, M. I., Mintun, M., & Raichle, M. E. (1988). Positron emission tomographic studies of the cortical anatomy of single-word processing. Nature, 331, 585-589.

Poizner, H., Klima, E. S., & Bellugi, U. (1987). What the hands reveal about the brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Price, C. J., Wise, R. J. S., Warburton, E. A., Moore, C. J., Howard, D., Patterson, K., Frackowiak, R. S. J., & Friston, K. J. (1996). Hearing and saying: The functional neuro-anatomy of auditory word processing. Brain, 119, 919-931.

Wernicke, C. (1874/1977). Der aphasische symptomencomplex: Eine psychologische studie auf anatomischer basis. In G. H. Eggert (Ed.), Wernicke's works on aphasia: A sourcebook and review (pp. 91-145). The Hague: Mouton.

Zatorre, R. J., Evans, A. C., Meyer, E., & Gjedde, A. (1992). Lateralization of phonetic and pitch discrimination in speech processing. Science, 256, 846-849.

2 comments:

David Poeppel said...

Hey, I thought you were going to suggest 10 ... Are you West Coasters having a touch of innumeracy? Oh well, I'll cheat as well. My list coming in a minute.

By the way, yes, these are things one might want to read and think about. Good selection.

Greg Hickok said...

You East Coasters are so rigid. Why restrict a Top 10 list to a measly 10 items? Push the envelope, dude! You know, like the 10 Items or Less line at the grocery store... these are only boundaries for the unimaginative. I mean, who counts EACH bottle of wine. It's just wine. Mass noun. One item. :-)