The brain’s language network is more extensive than previously thought
For decades, neuroscientists have known that specific regions in the brain’s left hemisphere are responsible for processing language.
Images for download on the MIT News office website are made available to non-commercial entities, press and the general public under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license . You may not alter the images provided, other than to crop them to size. A credit line must be used when reproducing images; if one is not provided below, credit the images to "MIT."
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from more than 700 people, the researchers identified 17 additional regions of the brain that appear to play a role in language. These regions are scattered across the brain, including parts of the cerebellum , hippocampus, and cerebral cortex, and they make up about 5 percent of the total volume of the adult brain — about the size of a large strawberry.
“Even though there are all these distant components, it’s pretty restricted in terms of volume. You don’t need that much of the brain to do language,” says Evelina Fedorenko, an MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research,and the senior author of the study.
Exactly how these regions contribute to language processing is still to be discovered, although the researchers have made some progress toward determining the functions of the cerebellar regions that they identified.
MIT postdoc Agata Wolna is the lead author of the paper, which appears in the Journal of Neuroscience . Other authors include Aaron Wright, a K. Lisa Yang Post-Baccalaureate Research Scholar at MIT; Colton Casto, a graduate student at Harvard University; Samuel Hutchinson, a graduate student at MIT; and Benjamin Lipkin PhD ’26.