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Lammert JM, Levine AT, Koshkebaghi D, Butler BE. Sign language experience has little effect on face and biomotion perception in bimodal bilinguals. Sci Rep 2023; 13:15328. [PMID: 37714887 PMCID: PMC10504335 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-41636-x] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/21/2022] [Accepted: 08/29/2023] [Indexed: 09/17/2023] Open
Abstract
Sensory and language experience can affect brain organization and domain-general abilities. For example, D/deaf individuals show superior visual perception compared to hearing controls in several domains, including the perception of faces and peripheral motion. While these enhancements may result from sensory loss and subsequent neural plasticity, they may also reflect experience using a visual-manual language, like American Sign Language (ASL), where signers must process moving hand signs and facial cues simultaneously. In an effort to disentangle these concurrent sensory experiences, we examined how learning sign language influences visual abilities by comparing bimodal bilinguals (i.e., sign language users with typical hearing) and hearing non-signers. Bimodal bilinguals and hearing non-signers completed online psychophysical measures of face matching and biological motion discrimination. No significant group differences were observed across these two tasks, suggesting that sign language experience is insufficient to induce perceptual advantages in typical-hearing adults. However, ASL proficiency (but not years of experience or age of acquisition) was found to predict performance on the motion perception task among bimodal bilinguals. Overall, the results presented here highlight a need for more nuanced study of how linguistic environments, sensory experience, and cognitive functions impact broad perceptual processes and underlying neural correlates.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jessica M Lammert
- Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Room 6126, London, ON, N6A 5C2, Canada
- Western Institute for Neuroscience, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
| | - Alexandra T Levine
- Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Room 6126, London, ON, N6A 5C2, Canada
- Western Institute for Neuroscience, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
| | - Dursa Koshkebaghi
- Undergraduate Neuroscience Program, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
| | - Blake E Butler
- Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Room 6126, London, ON, N6A 5C2, Canada.
- Western Institute for Neuroscience, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
- National Centre for Audiology, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
- Children's Health Research Institute, Lawson Health Research, London, Canada.
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Abstract
Early sensory deprivation, such as deafness, shapes brain development in multiple ways. Deprived auditory areas become engaged in the processing of stimuli from the remaining modalities and in high-level cognitive tasks. Yet, structural and functional changes were also observed in non-deprived brain areas, which may suggest the whole-brain network changes in deaf individuals. To explore this possibility, we compared the resting-state functional network organization of the brain in early deaf adults and hearing controls and examined global network segregation and integration. Relative to hearing controls, deaf adults exhibited decreased network segregation and an altered modular structure. In the deaf, regions of the salience network were coupled with the fronto-parietal network, while in the hearing controls, they were coupled with other large-scale networks. Deaf adults showed weaker connections between auditory and somatomotor regions, stronger coupling between the fronto-parietal network and several other large-scale networks (visual, memory, cingulo-opercular and somatomotor), and an enlargement of the default mode network. Our findings suggest that brain plasticity in deaf adults is not limited to changes in the auditory cortex but additionally alters the coupling between other large-scale networks and the development of functional brain modules. These widespread functional connectivity changes may provide a mechanism for the superior behavioral performance of the deaf in visual and attentional tasks.
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Costello B, Caffarra S, Fariña N, Duñabeitia JA, Carreiras M. Reading without phonology: ERP evidence from skilled deaf readers of Spanish. Sci Rep 2021; 11:5202. [PMID: 33664324 PMCID: PMC7933439 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-84490-5] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/19/2020] [Accepted: 02/16/2021] [Indexed: 11/10/2022] Open
Abstract
Reading typically involves phonological mediation, especially for transparent orthographies with a regular letter to sound correspondence. In this study we ask whether phonological coding is a necessary part of the reading process by examining prelingually deaf individuals who are skilled readers of Spanish. We conducted two EEG experiments exploiting the pseudohomophone effect, in which nonwords that sound like words elicit phonological encoding during reading. The first, a semantic categorization task with masked priming, resulted in modulation of the N250 by pseudohomophone primes in hearing but not in deaf readers. The second, a lexical decision task, confirmed the pattern: hearing readers had increased errors and an attenuated N400 response for pseudohomophones compared to control pseudowords, whereas deaf readers did not treat pseudohomophones any differently from pseudowords, either behaviourally or in the ERP response. These results offer converging evidence that skilled deaf readers do not rely on phonological coding during visual word recognition. Furthermore, the finding demonstrates that reading can take place in the absence of phonological activation, and we speculate about the alternative mechanisms that allow these deaf individuals to read competently.
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Affiliation(s)
- Brendan Costello
- Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi, 69, 20009, Donostia-San Sebstián, Spain.
| | - Sendy Caffarra
- Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi, 69, 20009, Donostia-San Sebstián, Spain.,Division of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.,Stanford University Graduate School of Education, Stanford, CA, USA
| | - Noemi Fariña
- Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi, 69, 20009, Donostia-San Sebstián, Spain.,Departamento de Psicología de la Educación y Psicobiología, Facultad de Educación, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, Logroño, Spain
| | - Jon Andoni Duñabeitia
- Centro de Ciencia Cognitiva - C3, Universidad Nebrija, Madrid, Spain.,Department of Language and Culture, The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsö, Norway
| | - Manuel Carreiras
- Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi, 69, 20009, Donostia-San Sebstián, Spain.,Departamento de Lengua Vasca y Comunicación, UPV/EHU, Bilbao, Spain.,Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain
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Shalev T, Schwartz S, Miller P, Hadad BS. Do deaf individuals have better visual skills in the periphery? Evidence from processing facial attributes. VISUAL COGNITION 2020. [DOI: 10.1080/13506285.2020.1770390] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/24/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Tal Shalev
- Department of Special Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
| | - Sivan Schwartz
- Department of psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
| | - Paul Miller
- Department of Special Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
| | - Bat-Sheva Hadad
- Department of Special Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
- Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
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Megreya AM, Bindemann M. A visual processing advantage for young-adolescent deaf observers: Evidence from face and object matching tasks. Sci Rep 2017; 7:41133. [PMID: 28117407 PMCID: PMC5259729 DOI: 10.1038/srep41133] [Citation(s) in RCA: 11] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/01/2016] [Accepted: 12/15/2016] [Indexed: 11/09/2022] Open
Abstract
It is unresolved whether the permanent auditory deprivation that deaf people experience leads to the enhanced visual processing of faces. The current study explored this question with a matching task in which observers searched for a target face among a concurrent lineup of ten faces. This was compared with a control task in which the same stimuli were presented upside down, to disrupt typical face processing, and an object matching task. A sample of young-adolescent deaf observers performed with higher accuracy than hearing controls across all of these tasks. These results clarify previous findings and provide evidence for a general visual processing advantage in deaf observers rather than a face-specific effect.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ahmed M Megreya
- Department of Psychological Sciences, College of Education, Qatar University, Qatar
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