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Fedorenko investigates how people understand and produce language. She uses behavioral and brain imaging (primarily fMRI) methods in healthy adults and patients with developmental and acquired brain disorders, as well as intracranial recordings and stimulation in neurosurgical patients, and computational modeling. Fedorenko has developed novel approaches for identifying language areas within individual brains and using these approaches, she has shown i) that language and thought are distinct in the human brain, including aspects of thought that have been long argued to share computational demands with language; ii) that syntactic processing is not localized to a particular region within the language network, and every brain region that responds to syntactic processing is at least as sensitive to word meanings; and iii) that representations from large language models align with human neural responses to language stimuli. In ongoing work, Fedorenko is probing the time-course, effective connectivity, and causal mechanisms of language processing using intracranial recordings and stimulation; applying computational approaches to develop a mechanistic-level understanding of linguistic processes; studying language use in rich social contexts; studying the interactions between the language system and reasoning systems during complex cognitive tasks; investigating how the language system emerges during development and how it changes in healthy aging; probing the mechanisms of recovery from aphasia; and relating inter-individual variability in neural language markers to behavior and genetics; among other directions.