Alona Fyshe uses machine learning to analyze brain images collected while people read, which allows her to study how humans represent the meaning they encounter in text, and how they combine words to understand higher-order meaning.  Alona also studies how computers learn to represent meaning when trained on text or images.  Alona has fused these two very different areas of study to discover connections between how computer models represent meaning, and how meaning is represented in the human brain. Alona is excited to extend her work on adults to infants and children learning language and to study language in a more holistic way that considers age, background, and cultural factors through the grant.