Speech & Language
Being able to generate and understand speech and complex language is a feature of our brain that sets us apart from other species. We are using direct recordings from the human brain via ECoG to shed light on the neural mechanisms that have evolved to support the transformation from scribbles on a page to neuronal representations of letter strings, to word recognition, phonological decoding, semantic processing and transformation of sensory representations to motor commands. Such processes are required in order to understand the processes involved in speech production (ie. listening and speaking) and the construction and understanding of sentences (ie. language).
Faculty: Eric Halgren, Bijan Pesaran, David Poeppel, Thomas Thesen, Lucia Melloni , Adeen Flinker