Language processing in the occipital cortex of congenitally blind adults

By Marina Bedny, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, David Dodell-Feder, E. Fedorenko, Rebecca Saxe. 2011

427 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Reading with sounds: sensory substitution selectively activates the visual word form area in the blind. (2012, methodology): “The scope of this reorganization is such that the visual cortex of the blind ‘‘switches tasks’’ and processes nonvisual functions that differ considerably from those typical of the sighted brain, such as memory and language in the primary visual cortex (Amedi et al., 2003; Bedny et al., 2011; see re”
How concepts are encoded in the human brain: A modality independent, category-based cortical organization of semantic knowledge (2016, background): “…blind people show high behavioral similarities with sighted individuals in conceptual representations, even when the processing of semantic features is directly related to visual features (i.e., color terms, verbs of vision) (Bedny et al., 2011; Landau and Gleitman, 1985; Noppeney et al., 2003).”
How Visual Is the Visual Cortex? Comparing Connectional and Functional Fingerprints between Congenitally Blind and Sighted Individuals (2015, background): “1, 2), perhaps due to more extensive reorganization in the left occipital cortex (Raz et al., 2005; Bedny et al., 2011; Watkins et al., 2012; Butt et al., 2013).”
Resting-State Retinotopic Organization in the Absence of Retinal Input and Visual Experience (2015, background): “…between early blind and sighted individuals One well-established finding, not reexamined in this study, is the observation that early blindness (Bedny et al., 2011; Qin et al., 2013; Burton et al., 2014) and anophthalmia (Watkins et al., 2012) result in a decrease in interhemispheric…”
Origins of task-specific sensory-independent organization in the visual and auditory brain: neuroscience evidence, open questions and clinical implications. (2015, neutral): “This might indicate distinctive V1 localizations for the two functional roles generally attributed to the blind V1; namely, higher-order cognitive functions such as language processing [33,53,54] and non-visual spatial (and also non-spatial) attention [3,14,55,56].”
Functional connectivity of visual cortex in the blind follows retinotopic organization principles (2015, background): “…cortex of the congenitally blind: highorder cognitive functions such as language processing on one hand (Burton et al., 2003; Amedi et al., 2004; Bedny et al., 2011) and non-visual spatial (and also non-spatial) attention on the other (Gougoux et al., 2005; Garg et al., 2007; Collignon et al.,…”