The brain is the organ of knowledge and the organizer of human abilities, the means of recognizing a face in a crowd, of conversing about experiences and images, of forming thoughts and developing ideas, and of instantly understanding words coming rapidly in conversation. This book seeks to explain how the brain accomplishes all that it does. Using a top-down modeling strategy, it charts relationships among words and other products of the brain's linguistic system to reveal the properties of that system. Going beyond earlier linguistics, it sets three plausibility requirements for valid neurocognitive theory: operations, developmental, and neurological. It must show how the linguistic system can operate for speaking and understanding, how it can be learned by children, and how it can be implemented in neural structures. Unlike theories that leave linguistics isolated from science, it builds a bridge to biology. The book is divided into 18 chapters, and includes an epilogue, appendix, notes, extensive scholarly references, and an index. (Author/KFT)