Centre for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

"Mouse study suggests that mutation to FOXP2 gene may have helped humans learn the muscle movements for speech."

"Faraneh Vargha-Khadem, a neuroscientist at University College London who has studied the KE family in which FOXP2 is mutated, thinks that the new findings could help explain the gene's role in perfecting the facial movements involved in speech.

But she does not see how changes in basic learning circuitry could explain how FOXP2 helps humans to automatically and effortlessly translate their thoughts into spoken language. “You are not deciding how you are going to move your muscles to form these sounds,” she says."

taken from: Nature News - click here to read the full article.

Katrin Schulze from the UCL Institute of Child Health presented related work on the relationship between Phonological working memory and FOXP2 at the Society for Neuroscience Conference in Washington D.C. in November this year.