The Language Neuroscience Podcast

In this episode, I talk with Liina Pylkkänen, Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at NYU, about her research program, and in particular her recent paper ‘Disentangling semantic composition and semantic association in the left temporal lobe’.

Pylkkänen lab website

Li J, Pylkkänen L. Disentangling semantic composition and semantic association in the left temporal lobe. J Neurosci 2021; 41: 6526-38. [doi]

In this episode, I talk with David Moses and Jessie Liu about their recent NEJM paper ‘Neuroprosthesis for decoding speech in a paralyzed person with anarthria’, in which they decoded intended utterances from the brain of an individual with anarthria using an electrode array implanted of sensorimotor cortex and machine learning.

Moses DA, Metzger SL, Liu JR, et al. Neuroprosthesis for decoding speech in a paralyzed person with anarthria. N Eng J Med 2021; 385: 217-27. [doi]

New York Times article

Related papers:

Bouchard KE, Mesgarani N, Johnson K, Chang EF. Functional organization of human sensorimotor cortex for speech articulation. Nature 2013; 495: 327-32. [doi]

Chartier J, Anumanchipalli GK, Johnson K, Chang EF. Encoding of articulatory kinematic trajectories in human speech sensorimotor cortex. Neuron 2018; 98: 1042-54. [doi]

Anumanchipalli GK, Chartier J, Chang EF. Speech synthesis from neural decoding of spoken sentences. Nature 2019; 568: 493-8. [doi]

Moses DA, Leonard MK, Makin JG, Chang EF. Real-time decoding of question-and-answer speech dialogue using human cortical activity. Nat Commun 2019; 10: 3096. [doi]

Makin JG, Moses DA, Chang EF. Machine translation of cortical activity to text with an encoder–decoder framework. Nat Neurosci 2020; 23: 575-82. [doi]

Chang lab website

In this episode, I talk with Elissa Newport, Professor of Neurology and Rehabilitation Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center, about her work on the neural and cognitive underpinnings of language development, including statistical learning, language after perinatal stroke, lateralization, plasticity, the critical period, and more.

Saffran JR, Aslin RN, Newport EL. Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 1996; 274: 1926-8. [doi]

Newport EL, Landau B, Seydell-Greenwald A, Turkeltaub PE, Chambers CE, Dromerick AW, Carpenter J, Berl MM, Gaillard WD. Revisiting Lenneberg’s hypotheses about early developmental plasticity: Language organization after left-hemisphere perinatal stroke. Biolinguistics 2017; 11: 407-22. [doi]

Olulade OA, Seydell-Greenwald A, Chambers CE, Turkeltaub PE, Dromerick AW, Berl MM, Gaillard WD, Newport EL. The neural basis of language development: Changes in lateralization over age. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2020; 117: 23477-83. [doi]

Elissa Newport’s website

Stephen is joined by Maya Henry, Andrew DeMarco, and Sarah Schneck to discuss some of our favorite presentations from the Clinical Aphasiology Conference 2021.
https://langneurosci.org/podcast/ep9

In this episode, I talk with Rodrigo Braga, Assistant Professor of Neurology at Northwestern University, about his recent paper on identifying the language network from functional connectivity analyses of resting state data.

Braga RM, DiNicola LM, Becker HC, Buckner RL. Situating the left-lateralized language network in the broader organization of multiple specialized large-scale distributed networks. J Neurophysiol 2020; 124: 1415-48. [doi]

Braga lab

Buckner lab