Angela D. Friederici

Early life and career

Friederici was born in Cologne, Germany in 1952. From 1970 to 1976, she studied linguistics at the University of Bonn (Germany) and the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), graduating with Ph.D. in linguistics in 1976. In 1975, she also began studying psychology at the University of Bonn and graduated with a degree in psychology (German: Dipl.-Psych.) in 1980. In 1986, she completed her professorial degree (Habilitation) at the University of Giessen. After a post-doctoral scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and work as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Paris Descartes University, Angela Friederici was awarded a professorship in cognitive psychology by the Free University of Berlin in 1989. In 1994, she became a Founding Director and Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig, which became the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in 2004.

Friederici also holds honorary professorships (Honorarprofessor) from the University of Leipzig (since 1995) for cognitive psychology, the University of Potsdam for Linguistics in the Faculty of Philosophy (since 1997) and for Medicine at the Charité, Humboldt-University Berlin (since 2004). Friederici's research centres on how the human brain processes language, examining both first and second language acquisition and use. She was the first to report the early left anterior negativity (ELAN), an EEG response to syntactic violations in sentences.

Her 2017 book Language in our Brain was endorsed by Noam Chomsky, in which she stated her current position on the genetics of language study regarding the FOXP2 gene. On page 222, Friederici states: "It has been proposed that FOXP2 is a gene that plays a major role in speech and language because the mutation of this gene was identified in a family with speech and language problems, although these were more speech-related rather than language problems as such. The view, however, has also been challenged for several reasons. One reason is that FOXP2 can also be found in non-human primates, mice, birds, and fish, thus in animals that do not speak."