This paper illustrates how questions about language processing and representations can be addressed through the study of people who suffered brain damage. It introduces an overview of the neurolinguistic literature on language production and discusses the convergences and divergences of neurolinguistic results with psycholinguistic data. It then focuses on phonological encoding and presents behavioral and electrophysiological studies on the questions of which information is represented vs. computed during phonological encoding and on the timecourse of phonological encoding during the language production processing.