Until the last few years, linguists' interest in the language of the neurologically impaired has been primarily from two orientations: psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic. The former has applied theories concerning the mental processing of language, using acquired language disorders as a test bed for exploring and expanding these theories. The latter attempts to correlate language (disordered or not) with functional lesion sites in the brain; it has recently received a major boost from the technical developments of functional brain imaging, but its main theoretical base remains that of psycholinguistic processing.