"Visual" Cortex Responds to Spoken Language in Blind Children
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Bedny-2015-_Visual_ Cortex Resp.pdf
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1.18 MB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Bedny, Marina
Richardson, Hilary
Saxe, Rebecca R.
Date Issued
August 2015
Journal
Journal of Neuroscience
Publisher
Society for Neuroscience
Citation
Bedny, M., H. Richardson, and R. Saxe. “‘Visual’ Cortex Responds to Spoken Language in Blind Children.” Journal of Neuroscience 35, no. 33 (August 19, 2015): 11674–11681.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Plasticity in the visual cortex of blind individuals provides a rare window into the mechanisms of cortical specialization. In the absence of visual input, occipital (“visual”) brain regions respond to sound and spoken language. Here, we examined the time course and developmental mechanism of this plasticity in blind children. Nineteen blind and 40 sighted children and adolescents (4–17 years old) listened to stories and two auditory control conditions (unfamiliar foreign speech, and music). We find that “visual” cortices of young blind (but not sighted) children respond to sound. Responses to nonlanguage sounds increased between the ages of 4 and 17. By contrast, occipital responses to spoken language were maximal by age 4 and were not related to Braille learning. These findings suggest that occipital plasticity for spoken language is independent of plasticity for Braille and for sound. We conclude that in the absence of visual input, spoken language colonizes the visual system during brain development. Our findings suggest that early in life, human cortex has a remarkably broad computational capacity. The same cortical tissue can take on visual perception and language functions.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.0634-15.2015
