ArticleDevelopmental cognitive neuroscience2020
A sensitive period in the neural phenotype of language in blind individuals.
Article in Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Extended Language Network: Language-Responsive Brain Areas Whose Contributions to Language Remain To Be Discovered.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Early life shifts in cortical inhibitory-excitatory balance underlies sensitive periods and skill development.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2026Article
- Functional reorganization of the visual cortex in blindness: a connectivity perspective.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Review
- A modality-independent proto-organization of human multisensory areas.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Diverging patterns of plasticity in the nucleus basalis of Meynert in early- and late-onset blindness.Brain communications · 2023Article
- Naturalistic stimuli reveal a sensitive period in cross modal responses of visual cortex: Evidence from adult-onset blindness.Neuropsychologia · 2022Article
- Face shape processingFrontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- 'Visual' cortices of congenitally blind adults are sensitive to response selection demands in a go/no-go task.NeuroImage · 2021Article
- Sensitive periods in cortical specialization for language: insights from studies with Deaf and blind individuals.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2020Article
- Lack of selectivity for syntax relative to word meanings throughout the language network.Cognition · 2020Article
- Mechanisms of learning and plasticity in childhood and adolescence.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Congenital blindness modifies the neural basis of language: "visual" cortices respond to linguistic information, and fronto-temporal language networks are less left-lateralized. We tested the hypothesis that this plasticity follows a sensitive period by comparing the neural basis of sentence processing between adult-onset blind (AB, n = 16), congenitally blind (CB, n = 22) and blindfolded sighted adults (n = 18). In Experiment 1, participants made semantic judgments for spoken sentences and, in a control condition, solved math equations. In Experiment 2, participants answered "who did what to whom" yes/no questions for grammatically complex (with syntactic movement) and simpler sentences. In a control condition, participants performed a memory task with non-words. In both experiments, visual cortices of CB and AB but not sighted participants responded more to sentences than control conditions, but the effect was much larger in the CB group. Only the "visual" cortex of CB participants responded to grammatical complexity. Unlike the CB group, the AB group showed no reduction in left-lateralization of fronto-temporal language network, relative to the sighted. These results suggest that congenital blindness modifies the neural basis of language differently from adult-onset blindness, consistent with a developmental sensitive period hypothesis.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.