Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 29, 2026
Assessment of Audio-Tactile Sensory Substitution Training in Participants with Profound Deafness Using the Event-Related Potential Technique
Published on: September 7, 2022
Observation of cortical activity during speech stimulation in prelingually deafened adults with cochlear implantation
Haruo Yoshida1, Yukihiko Kanda, Haruo Takahashi
1Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Nagasaki University Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Japan.
Objectives:
We evaluated the cortical activity of 2 successful prelingually deafened adult cochlear implant (CI) users who have been trained by auditory-verbal/oral communication since childhood.
Methods:
Changes in regional cerebral blood flow were measured by positron emission tomography using '8F-fluorodeoxyglucose while the subjects were receiving auditory language stimuli by listening to a story. Ten normal-hearing volunteers were observed as age-matched control subjects.
Results:
In both cases, the auditory-related regions, when compared to same regions in the control subjects, showed hypermetabolism in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the left precentral gyrus--similar to that in successful CI users who are prelingually deafened children or postlingually deafened adults. Both subjects had the ability to activate these areas, and this ability might be one of the reasons that accounts for such exceptionally good performance in older prelingually deaf CI users. As for the visual-related regions, hypometabolism was observed in Brodmann areas 18 and 19, and this finding might be related to the intensive auditory-verbal/oral education that the subjects had received since childhood.
Conclusions:
Despite the limits imposed by the small sample size and the spatial resolution of positron emission tomography, this study yielded insights into the nature of the brain plasticity in prelingually deafened adults who are successful CI users.
