Book excerpt: This distinctive handbook is a key reference for both clinicians and researchers working in the scientific investigation of aphasia. The focus is on how the study of acquired language disorders has contributed to our understanding of normal language and its neural substrates, and to the clinical management of language disorders. The handbook is unique in that it reviews studies from the major disciplines in which aphasia research is conducted - cognitive neuropsychology, linguistics, neurology, neuroimaging, and speech-language pathology - as they apply to each topic of language. For each language domain (such as reading), there is a chapter devoted to theory and models of the language task, a chapter devoted to the neural basis of the language task (focusing on recent neuroimaging studies) and a chapter devoted to clinical diagnosis and treatment of impairments in that domain.