Cerebral organization for language in deaf and hearing subjects: Biological constraints and effects of experience
Open accessAbstract
Cerebral organization during sentence processing in English and in American Sign Language (ASL) was characterized by employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at 4 T. Effects of deafness, age of language acquisition, and bilingualism were assessed by comparing results from ( i ) normally hearing, monolingual, native speakers of English, ( ii ) congenitally, genetically deaf, native signers of ASL who learned English late and through the visual modality, and ( iii ) normally hearing bilinguals who were native signers of ASL and speakers of English. All groups, hearing and deaf, processing their native language, English or ASL, displayed strong and repeated activation within classical language areas of the left hemisphere. Deaf subjects reading English did not display activation in these regions. These results suggest that the early acquisition of a natural language is important in the expression of the strong bias for these areas to mediate language, independently of the form of the language. In addition, native signers, hearing and deaf, displayed extensive activation of homologous areas within the right hemisphere, indicating that the specific processing requirements of the language also in part determine the organization of the language systems of the brain.
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The language localizer was previously shown to robustly and reliably identify each of the key brain regions previously implicated in high-level linguistic processing in at least 80% of subjects individually.
“This localizer was previously shown (29) to robustly and reliably identify each of the key brain regions previously implicated in high-level linguistic processing (30, 31) (Fig. 2 and Fig. S1) in at least 80% of subjects individually”
From Functional specificity for high-level linguistic processing in the human brain (2011) · cites this paper as [31]
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- Authors
- Neville, H. J., Bavelier, D., Corina, D., Rauschecker, J., Karni, A., Lalwani, A., Braun, A., Clark, V., Jezzard, P., & Turner, R.
- Affiliations
- National Institutes of Health (US)
- University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1227; Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC 20007; University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195; Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100 Israel; National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892; Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London WC1N3BG, United Kingdom; and University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 1998-02-03
- Volume
- 95
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 922-929
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC33817
- OpenAlex
- W2149301988
- Cited by
- 514
- References
- 47
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 14 · 2019: 24 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 12 · 2016: 13 · 2015: 26 · 2014: 23 · 2013: 15 · 2012: 20
- FWCI
- 16.86
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- europepmc.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Archive ouverte UNIGE (University of Geneva) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- Archive ouverte UNIGE (University of Geneva) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Hearing Impairment and Communication
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Hemispheric Asymmetry in Neuroscience
- Keywords
- language lateralization, American Sign Language, deafness, sentence processing, age of language acquisition, bilingualism
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Brain, Brain Mapping, Dominance, Cerebral, Humans, Language, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Pattern Recognition, Visual, Reading, Sign Language, Speech Perception, Persons With Hearing Impairments, Persons with Hearing Disabilities
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