Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 20, 2026
Assessment of Audio-Tactile Sensory Substitution Training in Participants with Profound Deafness Using the Event-Related Potential Technique
Published on: September 7, 2022
Age-dependent plasticity in the superior temporal sulcus in deaf humans: a functional MRI study
Norihiro Sadato1, Hiroki Yamada, Tomohisa Okada
1National Institute for Physiological Sciences, 38 Nishigonaka, Myodaiji, Okazaki, 444-8585, Japan. sadato@nips.ac.jp
Background:
Sign-language comprehension activates the auditory cortex in deaf subjects. It is not known whether this functional plasticity in the temporal cortex is age dependent. We conducted functional magnetic-resonance imaging in six deaf signers who lost their hearing before the age of 2 years, five deaf signers who were >5 years of age at the time of hearing loss and six signers with normal hearing. The task was sentence comprehension in Japanese sign language.
Results:
The sign-comprehension tasks activated the planum temporale of both early- and late-deaf subjects, but not that of hearing signers. In early-deaf subjects, the middle superior temporal sulcus was more prominently activated than in late-deaf subjects.
Conclusions:
As the middle superior temporal sulcus is known to respond selectively to human voices, our findings suggest that this subregion of the auditory-association cortex, when deprived of its proper input, might make a functional shift from human voice processing to visual processing in an age-dependent manner.
