SynthesisHuman brain mapping2021
Functional neuroanatomy of language without speech: An ALE meta-analysis of sign language.
Synthesis in Human brain mapping, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 77 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social perception in deaf individuals: A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies.Human brain mapping · 2023Pooled it
- Functional neuroanatomy of language without speech: An ALE meta-analysis of sign language.Human brain mapping · 2021Pooled it
- Differential cross-modal functional plasticity in deaf individuals: A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies.iScience · 2026Article
- Sign language narrative reveals universal and modality-specific features of cortical timescale hierarchy.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Nonverbal Communication Processing in Deaf Adults: An Activation Likelihood Estimation Meta-Analysis.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- The cognitive science of language diversity: achievements and challenges.Cognitive processing · 2025Review
- Language mapping during awake brain surgery in a deaf patient with a brain tumor: illustrative case.Journal of neurosurgery. Case lessons · 2025Article
- Article
- Neural adaptations in short-term learning of sign language revealed by fMRI and DTI.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Seeing speech: Neural mechanisms of cued speech perception in prelingually deaf and hearing users.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Investigating the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in language evolution: insights from comparative neuroscience.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Neural underpinnings of sentence reading in deaf, native sign language users.Brain and language · 2024Article
- Enhanced activations in the dorsal inferior frontal gyrus specifying the who, when, and what for successful building of sentence structures in a new language.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Atlas for the Lateralized Visuospatial Attention Networks (ALANs): Insights from fMRI and network analyses.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Driving and suppressing the human language network using large language models.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Autism-Related Differences in Cortical Activation When Observing, Producing, and Imitating Communicative Gestures: An fNIRS Study.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Neural representations of the content and production of human vocalization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- A modality-independent proto-organization of human multisensory areas.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Editorial: The evolution of the brain hardware for language.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Minimal Phrase Composition Revealed by Intracranial Recordings.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sign language (SL) conveys linguistic information using gestures instead of sounds. Here, we apply a meta-analytic estimation approach to neuroimaging studies (N = 23; subjects = 316) and ask whether SL comprehension in deaf signers relies on the same primarily left-hemispheric cortical network implicated in spoken and written language (SWL) comprehension in hearing speakers. We show that: (a) SL recruits bilateral fronto-temporo-occipital regions with strong left-lateralization in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus known as Broca's area, mirroring functional asymmetries observed for SWL. (b) Within this SL network, Broca's area constitutes a hub which attributes abstract linguistic information to gestures. (c) SL-specific voxels in Broca's area are also crucially involved in SWL, as confirmed by meta-analytic connectivity modeling using an independent large-scale neuroimaging database. This strongly suggests that the human brain evolved a lateralized language network with a supramodal hub in Broca's area which computes linguistic information independent of speech.
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Registered trials
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.