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Scientific article
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English

Cerebral organization for language in deaf and hearing subjects: biological constraints and effects of experience

Contributors

Neville, H J; Bavelier, Daphné; Corina, D; Rauschecker, J; Karni, A; Lalwani, A; Braun, A; Clark, V; Jezzard, P; Turner, R

Published in

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 95, no. 3, p. 922-929

Publication date

1998

Abstract

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.

Keywords

  • Adult
  • Brain/anatomy & histology/physiology
  • Brain Mapping
  • Dominance
  • Cerebral/physiology
  • Humans
  • Language
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Visual/physiology
  • Persons With Hearing Impairments
  • Reading
  • Sign Language
  • Speech Perception/physiology

UNIGE affiliation entities

Not a UNIGE publication

Citation (ISO format)

NEVILLE, H J et al. Cerebral organization for language in deaf and hearing subjects: biological constraints and effects of experience. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1998, vol. 95, n° 3, p. 922–929. doi: 10.1073/pnas.95.3.922

Main files (1)

Article (Published version)

Identifiers

Journal ISSN

0027-8424
602views
540downloads

Technical informations

Creation

03/10/2017 14:27:00

First validation

03/10/2017 14:27:00

Update

20/02/2026 11:28:04

Status update

20/02/2026 11:28:04

Last indexation

01/09/2026 11:50:30
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