Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden.
Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, SE-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden.
Neural Plast. 2018 Dec 18;2018:2576047. doi: 10.1155/2018/2576047. eCollection 2018.
Congenital deafness is often compensated by early sign language use leading to typical language development with corresponding neural underpinnings. However, deaf individuals are frequently reported to have poorer numerical abilities than hearing individuals and it is not known whether the underlying neuronal networks differ between groups. In the present study, adult deaf signers and hearing nonsigners performed a digit and letter order tasks, during functional magnetic resonance imaging. We found the neuronal networks recruited in the two tasks to be generally similar across groups, with significant activation in the dorsal visual stream for the letter order task, suggesting letter identification and position encoding. For the digit order task, no significant activation was found for either of the two groups. Region of interest analyses on parietal numerical processing regions revealed different patterns of activation across groups. Importantly, deaf signers showed significant activation in the right horizontal portion of the intraparietal sulcus for the digit order task, suggesting engagement of magnitude manipulation during numerical order processing in this group.
先天性耳聋通常通过早期使用手语得到补偿，从而导致具有相应神经基础的典型语言发展。然而，据报道，聋人比听力人具有较差的数值能力，并且尚不清楚两组之间的潜在神经元网络是否存在差异。在本研究中，成年聋人手语者和听力非手语者在功能磁共振成像期间执行了数字和字母顺序任务。我们发现，两组在两个任务中所招募的神经元网络通常相似，在字母顺序任务中背侧视觉流中存在显著的激活，表明字母识别和位置编码。对于数字顺序任务，两组均未发现显著的激活。对顶叶数值处理区域的感兴趣区分析显示，两组之间的激活模式不同。重要的是，聋人在数字顺序处理过程中，右侧顶内沟的水平部分对数字顺序任务表现出显著的激活，表明该组中存在数量操作的参与。
