A Sensitive Period for Language in the Visual Cortex: Distinct Patterns of Plasticity in Congenitally Versus Late Blind Adults

Overview

Journal Brain Lang

Publisher Elsevier

Specialties Neurology
Otorhinolaryngology
Psychiatry

Date 2011 Dec 14

PMID 22154509

Citations 42

Authors

Marina Bedny

Alvaro Pascual-Leone

Swethasri Dravida

Rebecca Saxe

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that blindness enables visual circuits to contribute to language processing. We examined whether this dramatic functional plasticity has a sensitive period. BOLD fMRI signal was measured in congenitally blind, late blind (blindness onset 9-years-old or later) and sighted participants while they performed a sentence comprehension task. In a control condition, participants listened to backwards speech and made match/non-match to sample judgments. In both congenitally and late blind participants BOLD signal increased in bilateral foveal-pericalcarine cortex during response preparation, irrespective of whether the stimulus was a sentence or backwards speech. However, left occipital areas (pericalcarine, extrastriate, fusiform and lateral) responded more to sentences than backwards speech only in congenitally blind people. We conclude that age of blindness onset constrains the non-visual functions of occipital cortex: while plasticity is present in both congenitally and late blind individuals, recruitment of visual circuits for language depends on blindness during childhood.

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