A new project investigating the functional interactions between the basal ganglia and the cortex in motor speech in people with Parkinson's disease, led by an interdisciplinary team consisting of Michael Barbe (neurology), Doris Mücke (phonetics), and Petra Schumacher (experimental linguistics), has been selected as one of four projects to receive funding from UoC Forum in 2025.
The project combines cortical EEG recording with simultaneous local field potential (LFP) recordings from basal ganglia structures during targeted language production tasks to advance our understanding of the basal ganglia-cortex interaction and the neurocomputational modeling of speech production. Due to advancements with deep brain stimulation implants it is now possible to record LFPs directly from basal ganglia regions while patients perform motor speech tasks and to link these signals to simultaneously recorded cortical EEG.