MIT associate professor Evelina Fedorenko studies the brain's language processing regions: how they arise, how they're affected by different kinds of input, and how each contributes to language comprehension.
As a young girl growing up in the former Soviet Union, Evelina Fedorenko PhD '07 studied several languages, including English, as her mother hoped that it would give her the chance to eventually move abroad for better opportunities. Her language studies not only helped her establish a new life in the United States as an adult, but also led to a lifelong interest in linguistics and how the brain processes language. Now an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, Fedorenko studies the brain's language-processing regions: how they arise, whether they are shared with other mental functions, and how each region contributes to language comprehension and production. Fedorenko's early work helped to identify the precise locations of the brain's language-processing regions, and she has been building on that work to generate insight into how different neuronal populations in those regions implement linguistic computations. "It took a while to develop the approach and figure out how to quickly and reliably find these regions in individual brains, given this standard problem of the brain being a little different across people," she says. "Then we just kept going, asking questions like: Does language overlap with other functions that are similar to it? How is the system organized internally? Do different parts of this network do different things? There are dozens and dozens of questions you can ask, and many directions that we have pushed on." Among some of the more recent directions, she is exploring how the brain's language-processing regions develop early in life, through studies of very young children, people with unusual brain architecture, and computational models known as large language models. From Russia to MIT Fedorenko grew up in the Russian city of Volgograd, which was then part of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, her mother, a mechanical engineer, lost her job, and the family struggled to make ends meet. "It was a…