ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Visual cortex entrains to sign language.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Predictive Processing in Sign Languages: A Systematic Review.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Pooled it
- Altered Hierarchical Visual Rhythm Tracking in Early Deafness.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Cortical tracking of sign language: The role of language knowledge in tracking of different articulators.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Decoding words during sentence production with ECoG reveals syntactic role encoding and structure-dependent temporal dynamics.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Signers and Speakers Show Distinct Temporal Kinematic Signatures in Their Manual Communicative Movements.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Deliberate synchronization of speech and gesture: Effects of neurodiversity and development.Language and cognition · 2024Article
- Periodic fluctuations in reading times reflect multi-word-chunking.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Fast and Slow Rhythms of Naturalistic Reading Revealed by Combined Eye-Tracking and Electroencephalography.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Subcortical language localization using sign language and awake craniotomy for dominant posterior temporal glioma resection in a hearing-impaired patient.Acta neurochirurgica · 2023Article
- New Perspectives on the Neurobiology of Sign Languages.Frontiers in communication · 2021Article
- Low-Frequency Entrainment to Visual Motion Underlies Sign Language Comprehension.IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering : a publication of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society · 2021Article
- Does gesture strengthen sensorimotor knowledge of objects? The case of the size-weight illusion.Psychological research · 2020Article
- The quantification of gesture-speech synchrony: A tutorial and validation of multimodal data acquisition using device-based and video-based motion tracking.Behavior research methods · 2020Article
- Alteration of Cortical and Subcortical Structures in Children With Profound Sensorineural Hearing Loss.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2020Article
- The left lateral occipital cortex exhibits decreased thickness in children with sensorineural hearing loss.International journal of developmental neuroscience : the official journal of the International Society for Developmental Neuroscience · 2019Article
- The Neural Network for Sign Language Comprehension.Language and linguistics compassArticle
- Article
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5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite immense variability across languages, people can learn to understand any human language, spoken or signed. What neural mechanisms allow people to comprehend language across sensory modalities? When people listen to speech, electrophysiological oscillations in auditory cortex entrain to slow ([Formula: see text]8 Hz) fluctuations in the acoustic envelope. Entrainment to the speech envelope may reflect mechanisms specialized for auditory perception. Alternatively, flexible entrainment may be a general-purpose cortical mechanism that optimizes sensitivity to rhythmic information regardless of modality. Here, we test these proposals by examining cortical coherence to visual information in sign language. First, we develop a metric to quantify visual change over time. We find quasiperiodic fluctuations in sign language, characterized by lower frequencies than fluctuations in speech. Next, we test for entrainment of neural oscillations to visual change in sign language, using electroencephalography (EEG) in fluent speakers of American Sign Language (ASL) as they watch videos in ASL. We find significant cortical entrainment to visual oscillations in sign language <5 Hz, peaking at [Formula: see text]1 Hz. Coherence to sign is strongest over occipital and parietal cortex, in contrast to speech, where coherence is strongest over the auditory cortex. Nonsigners also show coherence to sign language, but entrainment at frontal sites is reduced relative to fluent signers. These results demonstrate that flexible cortical entrainment to language does not depend on neural processes that are specific to auditory speech perception. Low-frequency oscillatory entrainment may reflect a general cortical mechanism that maximizes sensitivity to informational peaks in time-varying signals.
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