Language and Memory: Understanding Their Interactions, Interdependencies, and Shared Mechanisms

Book excerpt: Language and memory have historically been studied apart, as unique cognitive abilities, and with distinct research traditions and methods. Over the past several decades, however, a growing body of evidence suggests that language and memory are heavily intertwined and may even rely on shared cognitive and neural mechanisms. Cutting across theoretical and methodological approaches, these findings offer novel insights into the interactions and interdependencies of language and memory. These advances also have considerable theoretical and clinical implications for the neurobiology of language and memory, their development, representation, and maintenance across the lifespan, the intervention and rehabilitation of disorders of language and memory, and the evolution of these two quintessential human abilities.