Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

New data on the large number of modality-specific areas in the post-central cortex of several non-human primates, and recent anatomical and functional studies of the human brain suggest that very little of the cortex consists of poly-modal 'association' areas. These observations are used to reinterpret psychological and neuropsychological data on language comprehension in normal and brain-damaged humans. I argue that language comprehension in sighted people might best be thought of as a kind of code-directed scene comprehension that draws heavily upon specifically visual, and probably largely prelinguistic processing constraints. The key processes of word-recognition and the assembly of visual word meaning patterns into interacting chains, however, may be mediated in part by species-specific activity patterns in secondary auditory cortex similar