Summary: A new study harnessed a massive functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) dataset tracking more than 700 individuals. By adjusting statistical thresholds to capture smaller, subtle neural signals that traditional scans historically filter out, the team successfully identified 17 additional, distinct regions of the brain that actively participate in language processing.
These newly uncovered linguistic sites are scattered far outside the traditional left hemisphere strongholds, reaching deep into subcortical structures, memory centers, and motor coordination networks.
Key Facts
- The Strawberry Metric: Although these 17 newly unmasked language nodes are widely dispersed across distant anatomical landscapes, they are highly restricted in volume. Combined, they account for roughly 5 percent of the total volume of an adult human brain, a mass approximately the size of a large strawberry.
- The Resistance Frontier: Senior author Evelina Fedorenko reveals that early in her career, her language data frequently lit up regions outside the standard left hemisphere centers, but peer-review culture heavily discouraged publishing them. This new study intentionally looks back at over a decade of brain scans to systematically validate those neglected signals.
- The Language Localizer Grid: To pinpoint the hidden nodes, all 772 participants underwent a “language localizer” task. While hooked up to an fMRI scanner, subjects read or listened to real, structured sentences alongside strings of meaningless nonsense nonwords. The team mathematically isolated the exact coordinates that worked significantly harder during real sentences across both reading and auditory tracks.
- Infiltrating the Coordination Core: Out of the 17 newly unmasked sites, five are nestled inside the cerebellum, a major structure traditionally believed to exclusively manage motor control and bodily movement.
- Multitask Integration Hubs: To separate language-specific zones from general-purpose processing, the team cross-referenced data from a spatial working memory task. They discovered that three of the newly found cerebellar regions pull double duty, lighting up for both linguistic processing and nonlinguistic cognitive tasks. Fedorenko notes these sites are highly critical, likely acting as routers that integrate data across completely different cortical systems.
- Deep Brain Geography: The remaining hidden language nodes were mapped across an incredibly diverse anatomical layout, including the medial frontal cortex, the bottom edge of the left temporal lobe, the amygdala (the brain’s emotional threat radar), and the hippocampus (the master filing cabinet for long-term memory).
Source: MIT
For decades, neuroscientists have known that specific regions in the brain’s left hemisphere are responsible for processing language. However, a new study by MIT researchers shows that language processing also occurs in many other parts of the brain.
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.
Tracking language
The brain’s language processing centers include Broca’s area, first discovered in the 1800s, plus additional regions in the left frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Scientists have found that some of the corresponding areas of the right hemisphere also contribute to processing language, especially the social-emotional components of language.
There have also been hints that other parts of the brain might be involved in language processing. Early in her career, Fedorenko’s language studies often showed active brain regions outside of the canonical language centers, but she says she was discouraged from including them in her papers.
“When we initially started looking at language, in the first couple of papers, I tried to be comprehensive and include anything that seemed consistent across participants, and there was a huge amount of resistance,” she says. “People would say things like, ‘Well, we know those are not language areas, so please focus on the language areas.’”
In the new study, she and Wolna wanted to revisit those brain scans and see if they could systematically identify language regions outside of the standard language-processing areas.
To do that, they analyzed data from 772 people who had been scanned in Fedorenko’s lab since 2013. Each of these participants underwent a task known as a language localizer, which is used to determine the location of language processing areas for each subject.
During the test, participants read or listen to sentences as well as sequences of nonwords. For each person, the researchers measure the difference in strength of response when reading real sentences or nonsense sequences. The brain areas that work harder during the sentence condition are considered to be doing something relevant to language, especially if they respond while both reading and listening to sentences.
“It’s a very simple paradigm that lets you identify this core language system in individual brains,” Wolna says.
When searching for language areas, the researchers usually use a relatively strict statistical threshold. In this study, they relaxed the threshold and also used some targeted searches in subcortical areas, in hopes of finding all areas that may contribute to language processing.
“We always see this frontal temporal network, but there’s quite a lot of evidence that there are other regions that are also critical for language processing,” Wolna says. “By using a laxer threshold and zooming in on areas with weak MRI signal, we tried to maximize the chances of finding small and weakly responsive regions outside of this left frontal temporal system.”
A widespread network
For about 490 of the participants, the researchers also had data on how their brain responded during a spatial working memory task — remembering the locations of flashing squares on a grid. This task engages a brain network called the multiple demand system, which does not overlap with the core language areas.
This task allowed the researchers to ask whether any of the newly identified language-sensitive regions specifically respond to language and not more general cognitive processes.
Of the 17 new language sites that were revealed by this study, five are located in the cerebellum, which is mainly involved in coordinating the body’s movement. In a study published earlier this year, researchers led by Casto found that three of those cerebellar regions also became engaged during some nonlinguistic cognitive tasks, which was also seen in the new study.
“Those areas that respond to both language and some other tasks could be really interesting and important because they may be doing something like integrating information from different cortical systems,” Fedorenko says.
They also found language-selective regions in the medial frontal cortex, the bottom surface of the left temporal lobe, the hippocampus, and the amygdala. The researchers now plan to further study how these brain regions might contribute to language processing.
“We can now test some ideas from past work, and also more rigorously characterize these regions across different kinds of language manipulations, and different kinds of nonlinguistic tasks, to try to understand what it is that they’re doing,” Fedorenko says.
Funding:
The research was funded by the Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT, the McGovern Institute, MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence.
Key Questions Answered:
A: For decades, science has focused entirely on a core group of left-hemisphere hubs like Broca’s area, believing language was isolated there. This brilliant MIT study changes everything by proving that language processing is actually supported by a much larger, highly distributed network. By looking closely at weak MRI signals that were previously ignored, researchers found 17 new language zones scattered all over the brain, including areas that control physical movement and store memories.
A: This is one of the most exciting takeaways for neuroscientists. Five of the 17 newly discovered language sites are hidden in the cerebellum. Dr. Evelina Fedorenko believes these specific zones aren’t just reading or listening to words; instead, they act as massive integration hubs. Because they light up during both language tasks and spatial working memory puzzles, these areas likely act as data routers, blending incoming language with other deep thinking systems in the brain.
A: Surprisingly, no. While these 17 sites are widely distributed across different deep regions of the brain, they are actually tiny in terms of overall physical space. Combined, all of these newly discovered areas make up only about 5 percent of the total volume of an adult brain, which is roughly the size of a single large strawberry. As Dr. Fedorenko points out, even though our language system has distant, complex parts, it is still incredibly efficient and doesn’t require very much brain volume to run.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- Journal paper reviewed in full.
- Additional context added by our staff.
About this language processing research news
Author: Sarah McDonnell
Source: MIT
Contact: Sarah McDonnell – MIT
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“The extended language network: Language-responsive brain areas whose contributions to language remain to be discovered” by Agata Wolna, Aaron Wright, Colton Casto, Samuel Hutchinson, Benjamin Lipkin and Evelina Fedorenko. Journal of Neuroscience
DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0638-25.2026
Abstract
The extended language network: Language-responsive brain areas whose contributions to language remain to be discovered
Although language neuroscience has largely focused on ‘core’ left frontal and temporal brain areas and their right-hemisphere homotopes, numerous other areas—cortical and subcortical—have been implicated in linguistic processing.
However, these areas’ contributions to language remain unclear given that the evidence for their recruitment comes from diverse paradigms, many of which conflate language processing with perceptual, motor, or task-related cognitive processes.
Using fMRI data from 772 participants (438 females, 334 males) performing an extensively validated language ‘localizer’ paradigm that isolates language processing from other processes, we a) delineate a comprehensive set of areas that respond reliably to language across written and auditory modalities, and b) evaluate these areas’ selectivity for language relative to a demanding non-linguistic task.
In line with prior claims, many areas outside the core fronto-temporal network respond during language processing, and most of them show selectivity for language relative to general task demands. These language-selective areas of the extended language network include areas around the temporal poles, in the medial frontal cortex, in the hippocampus, and in the cerebellum, among others.
Although distributed across many parts of the brain, the extended language-selective network still only comprises a small fraction (<5%) of the grey matter volume, challenging the view that the entire brain processes language.
These newly identified language-selective areas can now be systematically characterized to decipher their contributions to language processing, including testing whether these contributions differ from those of the core language areas.
