Functional reorganization of the conceptual brain system after deafness in early childhood

Using fMRI we identified brain areas involved in conceptual processing in deaf and hearing participants. We found stronger recruitment of superior and middle temporal cortex in deaf versus hearing participants during an animacy decision task.This region, which forms auditory cortex in hearing people according to a sound listening task, was also activated in deaf, when they observed sign language, but not when they observed non-verbal hand actions. These results indicate that conceptual processing in deaf compared to heraing people more strongly depends on language representations. Addtional enhanced activation in visual and motor regions of deaf versus hearing participants during animacy decisions and a more frequent report of visual and motor features in a property listing task suggest that the loss of the auditory channel is partially compensated by an increased importance of visual and motor information for constituting object knowlegde. <br>