The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently revealed that MIT Associate Professor Evelina Fedorenko has been awarded the 2025 Troland Research Award for her pioneering contributions to comprehending the language network in the human brain.
The Troland Research Award is bestowed each year to honor exceptional accomplishments by early-career researchers across the extensive field of experimental psychology.
Fedorenko, an associate professor specializing in brain and cognitive sciences and a researcher at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, focuses on how minds and brains generate language. Her laboratory is dissecting the internal structure of the brain’s language system and examining the interplay between language and various cognitive, perceptual, and motor systems. Her innovative techniques merge precise assessments of an individual’s brain organization with cutting-edge computational modeling to achieve significant discoveries regarding the computations that facilitate the distinctly human capacity for language.
Fedorenko has demonstrated that the language network is selective for linguistic processing compared to various non-linguistic activities that are believed to share computational requirements with language, such as mathematics, music, and social reasoning. Moreover, her research has illustrated that syntactic processing is not confined to a specific area within the language network; instead, every brain region that responds to syntactic processing is at least equally sensitive to word meanings.
She has also illustrated that representations derived from neural network language models, including ChatGPT, closely resemble those found in the human brain’s language regions. Additionally, Fedorenko pointed out that while language models can excel at mastering linguistic structures and patterns, they struggle with employing language in practical, real-world contexts. According to her, the type of functional competency seen in the human brain is separate from formal language competency, necessitating not only language-processing networks but also brain regions responsible for storing world knowledge, reasoning, and interpreting social interactions. Contrary to a widely held belief that language is crucial for cognition, Fedorenko contends that language is not the vehicle for thought but primarily serves as a means for communication.
In conclusion, Fedorenko’s innovative research is revealing the computations and representations that drive language processing in the brain. She is set to receive the Troland Award this April at the annual gathering of the NAS in Washington.