Project: The neural infrastructure of speech articulation in neurotypical and autistic populations
Laboratories:
Ev Fedorenko, Ph.D. and Karen Chenausky, Ph.D.
Biographical Information:
Agata is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, working with Prof. Ev Fedorenko. She earned an MA in Psychology (2018) and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience (2023) from Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland working with Prof. Zofia Wodniecka. Her master’s research focused on the neural mechanisms underlying second-language interference in bilingual speech production, using ERP methods. In her PhD, she investigated language control and speech production in bilinguals using fMRI.
Current Work:
Producing spoken language relies not only on linguistic knowledge but also on the motor system’s ability to coordinate rapid mouth movements. Motor aspects of speech have been argued to be affected in autism, but the evidence is mixed. While severe speech difficulties are well-documented in minimally verbal and nonverbal autistic individuals, the articulatory abilities of verbal autistic adults have not been evaluated at scale, and the prevalence of mild-to-moderate challenges—often not apparent in everyday communication—remains unknown. This is partly due to the lack of large-scale normative data on articulation performance in neurotypical adults, which is necessary to identify meaningful deviations in autistic populations.To address this gap, I am conducting a large-scale behavioral study using tasks that stress the speech motor system in both neurotypical and autistic adults. I will also examine how articulatory abilities relate to language skills and domain-general cognitive abilities. Furthermore, I will use precision fMRI to investigate the brain systems that support articulation, their relationship to language and executive networks, and how neural responses relate to behavioral measures of articulatory performance in both neurotypical and verbal autistic individuals.
Publications:
Wolna, A., Wright, A., Casto, C., Lipkin, B., & Fedorenko, E. (2025). The extended language network: Language selective brain areas whose contributions to language remain to be discovered. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.04.02.646835