Document Type : Review article
Authors
Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabatabaei University, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
Neurolinguistics is an interdisciplinary field situated at the intersection of linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and computer science, seeking to explain how language is represented, processed, acquired, and recovered in the human brain under conditions of impairment. Despite the rapid expansion of neuroimaging methods, electrophysiology, lesion-based studies, and computational modeling, the literature in this field remains methodologically diverse and highly fragmented. Therefore, a systematic synthesis of recent research is necessary to identify dominant trends, research gaps, and future directions. The present study aimed to provide a structured review of a corpus consisting of 621 articles in neurolinguistics. Data were analyzed based on a review protocol, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and a multilabel coding framework through which research methods, core linguistic domains, applied themes, and emerging frontiers were identified.The findings showed that lesion-based and clinical studies continue to hold an important position in the field; however, methods such as EEG/ERP, fMRI, behavioral studies, and computational modeling have assumed increasingly prominent roles. From a thematic perspective, semantics and syntax accounted for the largest share among linguistic components, whereas language disorders, aphasia, rehabilitation, multilingualism, and second-language acquisition emerged as the most significant applied themes. In addition, artificial intelligence, machine learning, brain–computer interfaces, affective neurolinguistics, and embodied language were identified as emerging frontiers. The results indicate that modern neurolinguistics has moved beyond classical localizationist models and evolved into a network-oriented, data-driven, clinical, and theoretically integrative field that holds growing significance for understanding the relationship between brain, language, cognition, and social context.
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