Constantina and her team are seeking to understand the brain circuitry underlying speech and speech learning in humans via functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Although there is a wealth of research on brain regions activated while human adults 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.