Röder Brigitte, Stock Oliver, Bien Siegfried, Neville Helen, Rösler Frank
Experimental and Biological Psychology, Philipps-University Marburg, 35032 Marburg, Germany.
Eur J Neurosci. 2002 Sep;16(5):930-6. doi: 10.1046/j.1460-9568.2002.02147.x.
Neurophysiological recordings and neuroimaging data in blind and deaf animals and humans suggest that perceptual functions may be organized differently after sensory deprivation. It has been argued that neural plasticity contributes to compensatory performance in blind humans, such as faster speech processing. The present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map language-related brain activity in congenitally blind adults. Participants listened to sentences, with either an easy or a more difficult syntactic structure, which were either semantically meaningful or meaningless. Results show that blind adults not only activate classical left-hemispheric perisylvian language areas during speech comprehension, as did a group of sighted adults, but that they additionally display an activation in the homologueous right-hemispheric structures and in extrastriate and striate cortex. Both the perisylvian and occipital activity varied as a function of syntactic difficulty and semantic content. The results demonstrate that the cerebral organization of complex cognitive systems such as the language system is significantly shaped by the input available.
对盲人和聋人动物及人类的神经生理学记录和神经影像学数据表明，感觉剥夺后感知功能的组织方式可能会有所不同。有人认为，神经可塑性有助于盲人的代偿性表现，比如更快的言语处理能力。本研究采用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）来绘制先天性盲人成年人与语言相关的大脑活动图。参与者聆听具有简单或更复杂句法结构的句子，这些句子要么语义有意义，要么无意义。结果显示，盲人成年人在言语理解过程中不仅像一组有视力的成年人那样激活经典的左半球颞叶周围语言区域，而且他们还额外在右半球同源结构以及纹外和纹状皮质中表现出激活。颞叶周围和枕叶的活动都随句法难度和语义内容而变化。结果表明，诸如语言系统等复杂认知系统的大脑组织受到可用输入的显著影响。
