Neuroscience of Language Lab

Our lab investigates how human brains produce and understand language.  Although many animals communicate, sometimes in sophisticated ways, no other species uses the structured system of communication we call language.  The main aim of our research is to investigate what has changed in human brains that allow us to chat, read, gossip, and browse the web when our primate cousins cannot.  To do this, we use a set of non-invasive tools to measure brain anatomy and function in healthy, normal volunteers and compare our results with those from animal studies. These tools include transcranial magentic stimulation (TMS), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tractography.