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Abstract
More than two thirds of left-handed people have left-sided dominance, and in many of those who have right-sided dominance aphasia will develop with lesions in either the left or right hemisphere. Because the signs and symptoms of aphasia are generally caused by circumscribed brain dysfunction, the aphasias have been used as a diagnostic pointer to the location of the responsible cerebral lesion, an index to the nature of the physiopathologic processes behind the lesion, and a natural experiment capable of providing indirect information on human neurophysiology. Aphasia has also attracted the interest of psychologists, linguists, computational scientists, and philosophers, for whom it provides a testing ground for theories of mind and brain. [...]aphasia has a recognized status in neurology and neurosurgery, basic neuroscience, and the cognitive sciences.