The modern human brain exhibits the capacity for inferring complex hierarchical structures from linguistic input. While the isolation of specific neural hardware in healthy populations that contribute to this process has made significant strides with the advent of neuroimaging techniques with high spatiotemporal resolution, the question of how these particular components evolved in the first place remains unsettled. We may know with some confidence which regions of frontal or temporal cortex, and subcortex, contribute to basic syntactic recursion, semantic composition, morphological unification, and complex phonological processes. However, the cytoarchitectonic, connectomic and cellular differences between modern humans and non-humans that may have helped establish these regions as the major nodes in the language network has been given considerably less attention. This Research Topic aims to investigate this issue from a highly interdisciplinary perspective.
We are looking for contributions that address questions pertaining to any aspect of the evolution of our language-ready brain. Because of the complex nature of the task, researchers from different fields with an interest in the neurobiological aspects of language evolution (broadly construed) are welcome to contribute to this Research Topic, including linguists, psychologists, paleoanthropologists, ethologists, biologists, geneticists, and more. Likewise, different types of approaches and papers are welcome, from reviews of the available literature to experimental papers addressing specific aspects of this intriguing evolutionary puzzle.
The modern human brain exhibits the capacity for inferring complex hierarchical structures from linguistic input. While the isolation of specific neural hardware in healthy populations that contribute to this process has made significant strides with the advent of neuroimaging techniques with high spatiotemporal resolution, the question of how these particular components evolved in the first place remains unsettled. We may know with some confidence which regions of frontal or temporal cortex, and subcortex, contribute to basic syntactic recursion, semantic composition, morphological unification, and complex phonological processes. However, the cytoarchitectonic, connectomic and cellular differences between modern humans and non-humans that may have helped establish these regions as the major nodes in the language network has been given considerably less attention. This Research Topic aims to investigate this issue from a highly interdisciplinary perspective.
We are looking for contributions that address questions pertaining to any aspect of the evolution of our language-ready brain. Because of the complex nature of the task, researchers from different fields with an interest in the neurobiological aspects of language evolution (broadly construed) are welcome to contribute to this Research Topic, including linguists, psychologists, paleoanthropologists, ethologists, biologists, geneticists, and more. Likewise, different types of approaches and papers are welcome, from reviews of the available literature to experimental papers addressing specific aspects of this intriguing evolutionary puzzle.
