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. 2011 Mar 15;108(11):4429-34.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1014818108. Epub 2011 Feb 28.

Language processing in the occipital cortex of congenitally blind adults

Marina Bedny  1 , Alvaro Pascual-Leone, David Dodell-Feder, Evelina Fedorenko, Rebecca Saxe
Affiliations

Language processing in the occipital cortex of congenitally blind adults

Marina Bedny et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

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.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Percent signal change in the left pericalcarine cortex for experiments 1 and 2.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Percent signal change in the left occipital ROIs of the congenitally blind group and classic language regions of the sighted group.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Greater activity for +combinatorial stimuli in red (sentences + jabberwocky > word lists + nonword lists), greater activity for +lexical stimuli in blue (sentences + word lists > jabberwocky + nonword lists). Effects are displayed by group, thresholded at P < 0.05, corrected. For a list of brain regions, see Table S3.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.
Changes in resting-state correlations from the lateral occipital region (LLO) in the congenitally blind relative to the sighted group. Blue represents decreased correlations, and red represents increased correlations. The LLO seed region is shown in white. For a list of brain regions, see Table S4.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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