70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Your brain is where language - and all of your other thinking - happens. In order to figure out how language fits in among all of the other things you do with your brain, we can put people in fancy brain scanning machines and then create very controlled setups where exactly one thing is different. For example, comparing looking at words versus nonwords (of the same length, on the same background) or listening to audio clips of a language you do speak vs a language you don’t speak. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch talks with Dr Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, USA about figuring out which parts of the brain do language things! We talk about how we can use brain scans to compare language with other things your brain can do, such as solving visual puzzles, math problems, music, and inferring things about other people’s mental states, as well as comparing how the brains of multilingual people process their various languages. We also talk about the results of the fMRI language experiments that Gretchen got to be a participant in: which side is doing most of her language processing and how active her brain is for French compared to English. For links to things mentioned in this episode, including an image of Gretchen's brain:

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:22.0	I'm Gretchen McCulloch, and I'm here with Dr. Evlina Federenko, who's an associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, and we're getting enthusiastic about how brains make language work.
0:32.2	Hello, Ev. Hi, Gretchen. Hi, thank you so much for coming.
0:36.1	My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
0:37.8	So we always start by asking our guests, how did you get into linguistics?
0:42.5	I liked learning languages when I was little.
0:45.1	That was kind of my schick.
0:46.6	And I was in a school where English started pretty early.
0:51.2	And then my mom wanted me to be a citizen of the world. And so at age nine or 10,
0:56.4	I started learning French and then eventually we added Spanish and Polish because I had some
1:02.4	Polish ancestry, German, a couple others. And so I enjoyed that. I liked seeing patterns in languages.
1:10.0	This feels very relatable. Yeah. But I didn't really know what to do with that. I liked seeing patterns in languages. This feels very relatable. Yeah, but I didn't really
1:13.3	know what to do with that. So I was growing up in Russia, I should say, and I knew that I wouldn't
1:17.2	stay there in the long run, but I couldn't quite see yet how I could use all these languages
1:23.4	in a professional way. Like, I didn't want to be an interpreter, and it just wasn't really
1:28.2	clear to me what else I could do. And then when I started my undergraduate degree, I took a class
1:33.9	in linguistics, and then later in cognitive science, and learn that you can basically study
1:39.6	language and how we process language for a living. And so that's what I've been doing ever since.
1:45.1	Amazing. Yeah. I think I went through that. Oh, I like learning languages. So you're going to be a
1:49.5	transit under the UN. And I was like, oh, no, but what else is there? That's right. Yeah.
1:57.0	So how did that get you into your current research topic?
2:01.6	Well, I started out as an undergrad researcher doing some behavioral experiments and then realized that I kind of want to do this for a living.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.