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Dear all, For those of you who have already seen this message, please disregard; I am posting it again because we still need male volunteers for the study, and given that I posted it last December, I am hoping that new list members may see it and be interested. My name is Narly Golestani; I am a senior fellow working at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL in London. We are planning to do a study in which we will compare brain morphology of trained phoneticians to that of non-phoneticians. In previous work, using anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (aMRI) we have shown brain *structural* differences between individuals who are faster compared to ones who are slower at learning to hear foreign speech sounds in regions including the parietal cortices and in left Heschl's gyrus, a brain region including primary auditory cortex (Golestani et al, 2002, Neuron, Golestani et al, accepted, Cerebral Cortex). These differences were found within the 'normal' range (ie; in healthy individuals who had not received any particular professional training in listening to speech sounds, or in non-experts). We would like to follow up on this work, now with 'experts' - ie; in individuals who have received specific and fairly extensive training in listening to and in transcribing speech sounds. We are therefore looking for phoneticians who might be interested in participating. It would mainly involve one session of anatomical MRI scanning (we would probably also acquire diffusion tensor images - DTI - during the same MRI session). The testing will be done in London. If you are male, and think that you might be interested and would like further information about the study, please email me, ideally with phone number that I can reach you at so that I can provide you with further details. Also, it would be greatly appreciated if you could forward this message to your postdocs and postgrad students (eg; on mailing lists), or to any colleagues having had at least one but ideally more years of phonetic transcription training. Very best wishes, Narly Golestani. ==================================== Narly Golestani Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience 17 Queen Square London WC1N 3AR United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)20 7679 7529 ====================================