Naked mole rats are highly vocal eusocial mammals, that rely heavily on vocal communication to form and maintain social groups. We are interested in researching how vocal development genes and neurogenesis markers are expressed in the naked mole rat brain at different developmental timepoints. Here we report preliminary data on immunohistochemical characterization of cortical expression of FOXP2 and Doublecortin in the naked mole rat brain. FOXP2, forkhead-box protein P2, is a transcription factor associated with speech and language. Doublecortin is a neurogenesis marker that shows newly generated migrating cells. We obtained fixed brains from naked mole-rat pups at three developmental time points, P30, P90 and P180, and analyze the expression of FOXP2 and Doublecortin through immunohistochemical analysis of the brain slices. After imaging on a confocal microscope, we will use a custom analysis script to segment cortical regions and count the number of positive cells in certain areas to determine the overall expression of gene expression between developmental ages within target cortical regions. Our hypothesis is that FOXP2 and doublecortin will show higher expression at younger time points, which may coincide with a critical period of learning.