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Poster C in Poster Session C: Wednesday, August 5, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Comparing the speech processing hierarchy in early blind and sighted individuals

Allison Chen¹, Amanda LeBel², Jerry Tang¹, Alexander Huth³; ¹University of Texas at Austin, ²University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, ³University of California, Berkeley

Presenter: Allison Chen

Early blind individuals typically develop intact language abilities in the absence of visual experience. However, it is unclear how this lack of visual experience affects the organization of language processing in the brain. In this work, we assessed how the organization of language processing differs between early blind and sighted individuals. We modeled brain responses using features extracted from a self-supervised speech network to identify regions that process different levels of linguistic information. Outside of occipital cortex, we found that the same brain regions are responsible for acoustic and semantic processing in early blind and sighted participants. Moreover, we found that parts of occipital cortex act as additional semantic regions in early blind participants. To assess whether these brain regions encode the same linguistic features in early blind and sighted participants, we then compared linguistic tuning across groups for each layer of the speech network. We found that most semantically selective regions outside of occipital cortex have shared tuning across participant groups, while occipital cortex has inverted tuning. Together, our results characterize the organization of language in early blind participants and demonstrate cross-modal plasticity for semantic processing.

Topic Area: Auditory, Speech & Language Processing