Abstract
It is known that early sensory deprivation modifies brain functional structure and connectivity. The aim of the present study was to investigate the neuro-functional organization of reading in a patient with profound congenital unilateral deafness. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we compared cortical networks supporting the processing of written words in patient RA (completely deaf in the right ear since birth) and in a group of control volunteers. We found that congenital unilateral hearing deprivation modifies neural mechanisms of word reading. Indeed, while written word processing was left-lateralized in controls, we found a strong right lateralization of the fusiform and inferior occipital gyri activation in RA. This finding goes in the same direction of recent proposals that the ventral occipito-temporal activity in word reading seem to lateralize to the same hemisphere as the one involved in spoken language processing.
Highlights
Neuroscience literature has grown rich in studies demonstrating that in most individuals, the brain areas involved in word reading are lateralized to the left cerebral hemisphere [1]
In a subsequent study [16] aimed at contrasting the role of orthographic familiarity and other psycholinguistic variables while participants were engaged in a lexical decision task, we demonstrated the role of orthographic familiarity in determining the early activation of the left-occipito-temporal regions, in particular, of the left fusiform gyrus
The analysis performed on mean response times (RTs) of the control group evidenced no effect of the response hand
Summary
Neuroscience literature has grown rich in studies demonstrating that in most individuals, the brain areas involved in word reading are lateralized to the left cerebral hemisphere [1]. 200 ms, through a negative peak over the left posterior regions [5] This negative peak, identified by most authors as the so-called N170, is the first event-related potential (ERP) component sensitive to word orthographic properties [6,7]. We found an early effect of word orientation at about 150–200 ms, with larger N170 amplitudes to rotated compared to standard words. This component was affected by the selective attention to letters, being greater to target than to non-target words at left lateral occipital sites, reflecting the first stage of orthographic processing
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