Constantina and her team are seeking to understand the brain circuitry underlying speech and speech learning in human adults and babies, mainly via functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and electroencephalography. Although there is a wealth of research on brain regions activated while humans perform diverse speech-related tasks, there is still a poor resolution on the brain regions that are activated during speech production vs. the production of other non-speech vocalizations, such as sneezing, laughing or yawning.

The brain pathway that underlies speech learning of new sounds (e.g., new words in a foreign language) also remains obscure. This project focuses on one of the building blocks of speech learning, vocal production learning, purposely separating it from other blocks, such as short term and long term memory that enable us to learn, for example, the semantic meaning of a new word we learn (check out this preprint for more details).

In parallel, inspired by Constantina’s graduate work on zebra finches, Constantina and her team are trying to identify the behavioral mechanisms of speech learning in human babies. In this attempt, they are comparing speech learning in two different contexts: one where babies interact with a live human, and another where they interact with a vocal robot.

Stay tuned for our results!