A renewed debate on the role of the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) has revealed rather diverse functional engagement of this brain region in auditory language processing such as in speech intelligibility (Scott et al., 2000), in lexico-semantic processing (Kotz et al., 2002, 2003a; Scott et al., 2003), in local syntactic processing (Donkers et al., 1994; Grossman et al., 1998; Kotz et al., 2003b; Meyer et al., 2000; Humphries et al., 2001; Friederici et al., 2003) as well as in semantic integration (e.g., Stowe et al., 2000). In my talk I will address this potential functional diversity by presenting event-related brain potential (ERP) patient data that cover both lower level and higher level auditory language processing in patients with ATL lesions as well as patient (ATR) and healthy controls (HC). The current results suggest that the anterior temporal lobe may play a role in mapping and/or checking incoming phonetic information with lexical representation affecting both word and word category recognition, but only indirectly in semantic priming and semantic integration (see also McNellis & Blumstein, 2001).