Angela Friederici (born 1952) is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and is an internationally recognized expert in cognitive science, neurobiology, and linguistics.

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.

She was the first to report the early left anterior negativity (ELAN), an EEG response to syntactic violations in sentences.

One reason is that FOXP2 can also be found in non-human primates, mice, birds, and fish, thus in animals that do not speak.