• Project Leader: Dr Chris Petkov
• Staff: Dr. Quoc Vuong; Ben Wilson
• Sponsors: Funded by: Wellcome Trust Project Application 2008

Description: This is a Wellcome Trust funded project aiming to reveal the nature of the evolutionary precursors to the human brain regions supporting language-related abilities. Our hypothesis is that although the brain regions supporting speech and language comprehension are in certain ways unique to humans, these regions evolved from neural substrates that more generically support auditory and cross-sensory perception. This project will use MRI to study the function, structure and connectivity of the brains of adults during syntactic processing related to language and relate this information to that from our comparative MRI work at the Institute of Neuroscience. This combined effort aims to reveal the generic function of the language regions in the human brain and to better understand their functional abilities at the neuronal level with reference to a model system.

Staff Profile: Dr Chris Petkov, Dr. Quoc Vuon, Ben Wilson