The Role of Long-Range Brain Connectivity in Human Language Processing

Lead Agency grant projects - GACR GF25-15412L [Registered results] 2025 - 2028

Principal Investigator: Helmut Schmidt, Ph.D.

Sophisticated language skills are uniquely human. There is evidence that macroscopic and microscopic properties of specific long-range white matter fiber bundles are relevant for these skills and undergo plastic changes when these skills are trained, and involve information flows from and to Broca’s area.

The goal of this project is to link core computational operations that are specific to human language (verbal working memory, merging) with structural features that distinguish humans from their closest relatives. We will perform a language comprehension experiment that will yield behavioral, MEG, and diffusion MRI data, which will be used to specify individual whole brain models.

We will study how the language operations reproduced by the computational models depend on particular brain structure parameters, with focus on the aforementioned longrange white matter fiber tracts. This will allow us to draw specific conclusions on the relevance of the different fiber properties and the associated dynamic phenomena for crucial and specifically human language operations.

Project Aims

  1. Identify which connections and which structural traits in the language network are relevant for processing hierarchical syntactic structures
  2. Determine neural mechanisms by which long-range connections enable verbal working memory and structure building in language.