Language processing in the occipital cortex of congenitally blind adults

• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1014818108
• Publication Date: 2011-03-02T03:35:37Z
• Authors: Marina Bedny; Alvaro Pascual-Leone; David Dodell-Feder; Evelina Fedorenko; Rebecca Saxe
• Keywords: Occipital lobe

Humans are thought to have evolved brain regions in the left frontal and temporal cortex that uniquely capable of language processing. However, congenitally blind individuals also activate visual some verbal tasks. We provide evidence this activity fact reflects find individuals, behaves similarly classic regions: (i) BOLD signal is higher during sentence comprehension than linguistically degraded control conditions more difficult; (ii) modulated by phonological information, lexical semantic sentence-level combinatorial structure; (iii) functional connectivity with prefrontal thalamus increased relative sighted individuals. conclude for vision can take on processing as a result early experience. Innate microcircuit properties not necessary region become involved