ArticleFrontiers in psychology2014
The shape of the human language-ready brain.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers.
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Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Overexpression of OTX2 in human neural cells links depression risk genes.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Pleiotropic function of Dlx5/6 in the development of mammalian vocal and auditory organs.PloS one · 2025Article
- Bridging consciousness to our narrative brain: evolutionary insights.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- How (and why) languages became more complex as we evolved more prosocial: the human self-domestication view.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The (Co)Evolution of Language and Music Under Human Self-Domestication.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- What made us "hunter-gatherers of words".Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Delving into the Genetic Causes of Language Impairment in a Case of Partial Deletion ofMolecular syndromology · 2023Article
- Review
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- A Brain Region-Specific Expression Profile for Genes Within Large Introgression Deserts and Under Positive Selection inFrontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2022Article
- Reply to: "Historical pursuits of the language pathway hypothesis of schizophrenia".NPJ schizophrenia · 2021Article
- Shaping modern human skull through epigenetic, transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation of the RUNX2 master bone gene.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- DLX5/6 GABAergic Expression Affects Social Vocalization: Implications for Human Evolution.Molecular biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Language evolution: examining the link between cross-modality and aggression through the lens of disorders.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The genetic determinants of language network dysconnectivity in drug-naïve early stage schizophrenia.NPJ schizophrenia · 2021Article
- Did Dog Domestication Contribute to Language Evolution?Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
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2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Our core hypothesis is that the emergence of our species-specific language-ready brain ought to be understood in light of the developmental changes expressed at the levels of brain morphology and neural connectivity that occurred in our species after the split from Neanderthals-Denisovans and that gave us a more globular braincase configuration. In addition to changes at the cortical level, we hypothesize that the anatomical shift that led to globularity also entailed significant changes at the subcortical level. We claim that the functional consequences of such changes must also be taken into account to gain a fuller understanding of our linguistic capacity. Here we focus on the thalamus, which we argue is central to language and human cognition, as it modulates fronto-parietal activity. With this new neurobiological perspective in place, we examine its possible molecular basis. We construct a candidate gene set whose members are involved in the development and connectivity of the thalamus, in the evolution of the human head, and are known to give rise to language-associated cognitive disorders. We submit that the new gene candidate set opens up new windows into our understanding of the genetic basis of our linguistic capacity. Thus, our hypothesis aims at generating new testing grounds concerning core aspects of language ontogeny and phylogeny.
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