title: The cerebellum and language: the story so far.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The cerebellum was traditionally considered to be exclusively involved in the coordination of voluntary movement, gait, posture, balance and motor speech. However, this view was challenged by recent neuroanatomical, neuroimaging and clinical findings, providing preliminary evidence of a cerebellar contribution to linguistic functioning.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To discuss the role of the cerebellum in a variety of linguistic functions and to explore the underlying mechanisms.
  
  
  METHODS
  A literature search was conducted via electronic databases. Exclusion criteria were: disorders following congenital cerebellar lesions, motor speech disorders, cognitive deficits outside the language sphere, neuropsychiatric disorders and insufficient information on the cerebellar role in language. Abstracts were not included. In addition, only adult subjects were taken into consideration.
  
  
  RESULTS
  A variety of linguistic disorders were found to occur following acquired cerebellar lesions: (1) impaired phonological and semantic fluency; (2) agrammatism (at morphological and sentence level); (3) naming and word finding difficulties; (4) cerebellar-induced aphasia; (5) reading difficulties; (6) writing problems, and (7) higher-level language deficits, including disturbed listening comprehension, impaired language proficiency and metalinguistic ability. Several hypotheses have been suggested to explain the nature of the cerebellar contribution to language. However, findings are not univocal.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The cerebellum appears to be involved in a variety of linguistic functions. However, the precise nature of this contribution is not clear yet. Linguistic, neuroimaging, neuroanatomical and neuropsychological studies should be combined in order to disentangle the specific contribution of the cerebellum to linguistic processing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: Hyo Jung
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: De Smet
authors.forename: Hanne
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Baillieux
authors.forename: Peter P
authors.initials: PP
authors.lastname: De Deyn
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Mariën
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Paquier
mesh_terms: D002531:Cerebellum / Q000502:physiology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000209:etiology; D008037:Linguistics