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Initiatives & Projectsproject 17 -- Neural basis of single-word reading in bilingual adultsILM 8: Neural basis of single-word reading in bilingual adults (Eden & Perfetti):
Studies comparing the functional anatomy of hearing and deaf participants usually include hearing signers, who acquired American Sign Language (ASL) before the age of four and are fluent signers. These subjects provide an important control group to the deaf signers in that they, like the deaf signers, are bilingual in ASL and English. However, in these studies, as all studies to date, we do not have a good way of interpreting our findings in the context of the bilingual brain. In other words, when we find differences between deaf signers and hearing signers, we attribute these to a lack of sensory experience in audition. However, at the same time, deaf bilinguals, like hearing bilinguals of spoken languages, may exhibit different cortical organization in the brain from bilingual representations and/or learning English as a second language. We address this problem directly by (1) asking whether subjects who are bilingual (ASL and English) and bimodal engage the same brain regions as bilingual hearing subjects whose two languages are within the same modality (Spanish and English) and (2) examining the functional anatomy of reading in bilingual versus monolingual hearing subjects. We predict that there will be significant between-group differences in the recruitment of visual cortex during word processing, as use of a visual language (ASL) will induce greater use of the visual system even when that language is not in use. The results will have important implications for reading in deaf populations and may lend insight into the cortical plasticity for reading under different language and sensory experiences. Related Initiatives:
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