This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Dr. Evelina Fedorenko who’s an Associate Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and we’re getting enthusiastic about how brains make language work. Hello, Ev!

Ev: Hi, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Hi, thank you so much for coming.

Ev: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Gretchen: We always start by asking our guests, “How did you get into linguistics?”

Ev: I liked learning languages when I was little. That was my schtick. I was in a school were English was started pretty early. Then my mom wanted me to be a citizen of the world, so at age 9 or 10, I started learning French. Eventually, we added Spanish and Polish because I had some Polish ancestry, German, a couple others. And so, I enjoyed that. I liked seeing patterns in languages.

Gretchen: This feels very relatable.

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Lingthusiasm Episode 70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko

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.  

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about language inside an MRI machine! Gretchen talks with Saima Malik-Moraleda, a graduate student in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology at Harvard University in Boston, USA, about the details of what it was like inside the MRI machine doing the studies we reported on here - it’s a Lingthusiasm language-in-the-brain interview double feature!

Join us on Patreon to listen to this and 60+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Ev Fedorenko on Twitter
• Ev Fedorenko’s Language Lab at MIT
  
• One of the papers Ev and Saima have been working on: An investigation across 45 languages and 12 language families reveals a universal language network
• Alice in the Language Localizer Wonderland - for more information about the study and if you happen to be in the Boston area and want to participate! They’re currently especially looking for people who are multilingual or speak a conlang including Esperanto, Klingon, High Valyrian, or Dothraki (for which you can get travel funding…), but other studies will also come along if you’re reading this from the future.
• If you wish you could see pictures of your brain and aren’t in the Boston area, keep an eye out for any other large research universities you might be near, as many are looking for participants! (Googling “research subject pool” + name of a local university may help find something.)  

Here’s the image of Gretchen’s brain and a graph of her responses to listening to various languages:

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening. To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.

Lingthusiasm is on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.

Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our production manager is Liz McCullough. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Bonus 65: Language inside an MRI machine - Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda

Your brain is where language - and all of your other thinking - happens. But unlike parts of your mouth, hands, and face, which are easy to observe directly, observing the brain takes special equipment. One of these tools is an MRI machine, which is a giant magnet big enough for a person to fit inside. The trick is, your blood has iron in it, and iron is magnetic, and so a huge enough magnet can pick up on which areas of your body have a tiny bit more blood flowing to them at a given time. This means we can see which areas of your brain are more active when you’re doing something languagey.

In this bonus episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch talks with Saima Malik-Moraleda, a graduate student in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology at Harvard University in Boston, USA, about some MRI language experiments that Gretchen got to be a participant in! First, we set up the MRI machine and get a baseline (by watching cartoons!). Next, we had three tasks: reading words and pseudo-words (like “big” and “bik”) on a screen, remembering a sequence of little blue squares, and listening to a passage from “Alice in Wonderland” in several languages. We also talk about how most people’s language centre is on the left side of the brain, except for some left-handed people…is Gretchen going to be one of them? The team needs to crunch some numbers, so we’ll find out in two weeks during the next main episode! 

Listen to the interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda and many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon