Comparative neuroimaging to study the neural infrastructure for language

Abstract Although our ability to communicate via speech and language is a uniquely human experience, we see the roots of language behaviours in the animal kingdom. A comparative approach mapping the shared and distinct aspects of brain organization across species can therefore help us understand how the language-capable brain evolved. New developments in comparative neuroimaging, especially magnetic resonance imaging, have paved the way to study a large number of species with great anatomical detail. Efforts to standardize data collection and the electronic nature of the data facilitate data harmonization and the construction of shared databases. Having access to multimodal comparable maps of brain architecture gave rise to new analysis approaches. We can now analyse mammalian brains in an abstract anatomical space based on features that can be described reliably across species. Such a common space approach allows us to dissociate different forms of anatomical specializations and to formulate new testable hypotheses.