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Nature 387, 547-548 (5 June 1997) | doi:10.1038/42347

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Words and rules in the human brain

Steven Pinker1

A new study of neurological patients who can analyse regular past-tense forms of verbs but not irregular ones, or vice versa, suggests that the mental dictionary and the mental grammar may be kept in different parts of the brain.Regular and irregular verbs, the bane of every language student, would seem to be an unlikely route to understanding the brain.

  1. Steven Pinker is in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139-4307, USA.