Statements in which the resource exists as a subject.
PredicateObject
rdf:type
lifeskim:mentions
pubmed:issue
5
pubmed:dateCreated
2002-10-9
pubmed:abstractText
Neurophysiological recordings and neuroimaging data in blind and deaf animals and humans suggest that perceptual functions may be organized differently after sensory deprivation. It has been argued that neural plasticity contributes to compensatory performance in blind humans, such as faster speech processing. The present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map language-related brain activity in congenitally blind adults. Participants listened to sentences, with either an easy or a more difficult syntactic structure, which were either semantically meaningful or meaningless. Results show that blind adults not only activate classical left-hemispheric perisylvian language areas during speech comprehension, as did a group of sighted adults, but that they additionally display an activation in the homologueous right-hemispheric structures and in extrastriate and striate cortex. Both the perisylvian and occipital activity varied as a function of syntactic difficulty and semantic content. The results demonstrate that the cerebral organization of complex cognitive systems such as the language system is significantly shaped by the input available.
pubmed:language
eng
pubmed:journal
pubmed:citationSubset
IM
pubmed:status
MEDLINE
pubmed:month
Sep
pubmed:issn
0953-816X
pubmed:author
pubmed:issnType
Print
pubmed:volume
16
pubmed:owner
NLM
pubmed:authorsComplete
Y
pubmed:pagination
930-6
pubmed:dateRevised
2006-11-15
pubmed:meshHeading
pubmed:year
2002
pubmed:articleTitle
Speech processing activates visual cortex in congenitally blind humans.
pubmed:affiliation
Experimental and Biological Psychology, Philipps-University Marburg, 35032 Marburg, Germany. roeder@mailer.uni-marburg.de
pubmed:publicationType
Journal Article, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't