ArticlePloS one2023
Spoken language processing activates the primary visual cortex.
Article in PloS one, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 34 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
- Article
- Selection with support: How cross-modal attention shapes smooth pursuit eye movements.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Precision fMRI reveals that the language network exhibits adult-like left-hemispheric lateralization by 4 years of age.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Children with lower language skill engage additional brain mechanisms in both hemispheres during sentence comprehension.Research square · 2025Article
- Precision fMRI reveals that the language network exhibits adult-like left-hemispheric lateralization by 4 years of age.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Neural representation of nouns and verbs in congenitally blind and sighted individuals.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Decoding semantic sound categories in early visual cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Similar Computational Hierarchies for Reading and Speech in the Occipital Cortex of Sighed and Blind: Converging Evidence from fMRI and Chronometric TMS.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Differential Effects of Visual and Auditory Cognitive Tasks on Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Bilateral Word Selectivity Gradients in the Visual Word Form System in Skilled Deaf Readers.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Alignment of auditory artificial networks with massive individual fMRI brain data leads to generalisable improvements in brain encoding and downstream tasks.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Resting-state functional connectivity changes following audio-tactile speech training.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- The transformation of sensory to perceptual braille letter representations in the visually deprived brain.eLife · 2024Article
- Touch to text: Spatiotemporal evolution of braille letter representations in blind readers.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Longitudinal stability of individual brain plasticity patterns in blindness.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Longitudinal stability of individual brain plasticity patterns in blindness.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Naturalistic stimuli reveal a sensitive period in cross modal responses of visual cortex: Evidence from adult-onset blindness.Neuropsychologia · 2022Article
- The Role of Visual Experience in Individual Differences of Brain Connectivity.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Brains and algorithms partially converge in natural language processing.Communications biology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Primary visual cortex (V1) is generally thought of as a low-level sensory area that primarily processes basic visual features. Although there is evidence for multisensory effects on its activity, these are typically found for the processing of simple sounds and their properties, for example spatially or temporally-congruent simple sounds. However, in congenitally blind individuals, V1 is involved in language processing, with no evidence of major changes in anatomical connectivity that could explain this seemingly drastic functional change. This is at odds with current accounts of neural plasticity, which emphasize the role of connectivity and conserved function in determining a neural tissue's role even after atypical early experiences. To reconcile what appears to be unprecedented functional reorganization with known accounts of plasticity limitations, we tested whether V1's multisensory roles include responses to spoken language in sighted individuals. Using fMRI, we found that V1 in normally sighted individuals was indeed activated by comprehensible spoken sentences as compared to an incomprehensible reversed speech control condition, and more strongly so in the left compared to the right hemisphere. Activation in V1 for language was also significant and comparable for abstract and concrete words, suggesting it was not driven by visual imagery. Last, this activation did not stem from increased attention to the auditory onset of words, nor was it correlated with attentional arousal ratings, making general attention accounts an unlikely explanation. Together these findings suggest that V1 responds to spoken language even in sighted individuals, reflecting the binding of multisensory high-level signals, potentially to predict visual input. This capability might be the basis for the strong V1 language activation observed in people born blind, re-affirming the notion that plasticity is guided by pre-existing connectivity and abilities in the typically developed brain.
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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.