neurobiology

Structural brain differences associated with deafness and early sign language acquisition: A multimethod morphometric analysis

Introduction. Congenital deafness and sign language acquisition provide a unique model for investigating how sensory and language-related experience shape structural brain organization. Neuroimaging studies have consistently demonstrated that sign …

The hybrid neural architecture of grammar: Meta-analytic evidence for domain-specific and domain-general networks underlying syntactic processing

Introduction: Syntax, the ability to combine discrete linguistic elements into hierarchically structured expressions, is a defining feature of human language. In cognitive neuroscience, syntactic processing encompasses the retrieval and manipulation …

Beyond the classical anatomical concept of Broca’s region: New subdivisions and link to function

Introduction Broca’s region is a key region involved in language processing and has also been reported in experiments on action processing. We have previously mapped areas 44 and 45 in histological sections of ten human brains using an …

From brain areas to linguistic function

This lecture explores how the core and extended language networks of the brain are organized and what current research reveals about their function, structure, and development (Trettenbrein & Friederici, 2025). Against this general background, two …

Fine-grained cytoarchitectonic parcellation of Broca’s region supports functional differentiation in Julich-Brain Atlas (EBRAINS)

This study presents a refined cytoarchitectonic parcellation of Broca’s region into four distinct subdivisions (44p, 44a, 45p, and 45a), revealing clear microstructural and functional differentiation. High-resolution 3D reconstructions and …

The core of language is modality-independent: Evidence from studies of German Sign Language (DGS)

The capacity for language enables humans to flexibly link meaning to sound or sign by means of grammar. Significantly, the computations underlying this ability appear to be fundamentally abstract and therefore at least to an extent independent of the …

Developing an fMRI localizer for German Sign Language (DGS)

Introduction: Functional localizers in fMRI enable the precise and participant-specific identification of voxels that respond to a particular cognitive function or task of interest (e.g., Kanwisher et al., 1997; Saxe et al., 2006) and have been …

The core language network at rest: Differences in resting-state functional connectivity between deaf signers and hearing non-signers

Introduction: The major networks implicated in language processing can also be discerned using resting-state MRI and several studies have used data-driven approaches to study whole-brain resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) in deaf signers. …

Functional neuroanatomy of sign language production: An Activation Likelihood Estimation meta-analysis

Introduction: Sign languages are natural languages in the visual-kinesthetic modality (Kusters et al., 2020) which use the hands, body, facial expressions like eyebrow movement and eye gaze, mouthing, and mouth gestures as articulators (Hodge, 2020). …

Language-related cortical pathways in deaf signers: Core invariance and modality-specific variability

Introduction: Language processing in the adult neurotypical brain is subserved by several white-matter pathways which connect inferior frontal, temporal, and parietal language-relevant cortical regions. Here, we used diffusion-weighted MRI to compare …