Discourse Deficits Following Right Hemisphere Damage in Deaf Signers

Hickok, Gregory; Wilson, Mark; Clark, Kevin; Klima, Edward S.; Kritchevsky, Mark; Bellugi, Ursula

doi:10.1006/brln.1998.1995

Cited by 38 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These include how descriptions of events link to each other from sentence to sentence (discourse cohesion) and the ''melody'' of a phrase or series of phrases, which varies depending on what aspect is being communicated (prosody: the pattern of spoken intonation and stress-see Beeman & Chiarello, 1998). The RH appears to support these functions in signed languages, too (Hickok et al, 1999). However, some researchers suspect that signed language may engage the RH to an even greater extent than spoken language.…”

Section: Brain Lesions In Signersmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…In contrast, the ASL sentences were presented naturally, with their normal discourse properties. Prosodic features, used to interpret the discourse meanings of an utterance, can activate rightlateralized regions in neuroimaging studies of spoken language (Friederici & Alter, 2004), and patients with RH lesions often have difficulty with such features, in both sign and speech (Hickok et al, 1999). In addition, signers were presented with their native language in its primary form.…”

Section: Brain Function-do Sign and Speech Engage The Same Regions?mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Sign Language and the Brain: A Review

Campbell¹,

MacSweeney²,

Waters³

2007

Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How are signed languages processed by the brain? This review briefly outlines some basic principles of brain structure and function and the methodological principles and techniques that have been used to investigate this question. We then summarize a number of different studies exploring brain activity associated with sign language processing especially as compared to speech processing. We focus on lateralization: is signed language lateralized to the left hemisphere (LH) of native signers, just as spoken language is lateralized to the LH of native speakers, or could sign processing involve the right hemisphere to a greater extent than speech processing? Experiments that have addressed this question are described, and some problems in obtaining a clear answer are outlined.In order to understand how the brain processes signed language, we need a reasonable road map of the brainits general structure and the probable functions of different regions. The study of brain injury (lesions) has provided a well-established methodology for inferring relations of structure and function in the brain. The consequences of brain lesions depend on which part of the brain is damaged. For example, a person with damage to the front of the left side of the brain might be unable to speak. However, someone else, with damage to the back of the right side of the brain, might be able to produce structured language utterances but may have lost some spatial abilities and be unable to see more than one thing at a time. Patterns like this appear to be highly systematic over many individual patients. One straightforward inference is that, in most people, the front of the left side of the brain is required for producing language, whereas the back of the right half of the brain is needed for visuospatial processing. That is, these two functions are ''localized'' and cannot be readily undertaken by other regions. Since the mid-19 century, the likely relationships between particular brain regions and their functions have been inferred from descriptions of such systematic patterns of individual brain injuries. Such research has provided a basic map of the brain upon which subsequent research has built. A Tour of the BrainAs in all vertebrates, the human brain consists of two near-identical hemispheres, reflected on each other. The gray cortex (cortex 5 crust in Latin) comprises minute and densely packed nerve cells, to a depth of 0.5-1 cm. The corded band that connects the two hemispheres comprises many tightly bunched white fibers. Such fibers can also be seen beneath the cortex and run out to the spinal cord. These are bundles of individual nerve axons that carry information between nerve cells. Long axon fibers are organized in bundles (Latin-fasces/fasciculi), like cables that carry electricity, TV, or telephone information under urban roads. The glossy white protective sheath of myelin insulatesWe are grateful to two anonymous reviewers and Cheryl Capek for their comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. We thank Adam Schembri for sugges...

show abstract

Section: Brain Lesions In Signersmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Brain Function-do Sign and Speech Engage The Same Regions?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sign Language and the Brain: A Review

Campbell¹,

MacSweeney²,

Waters³

2007

Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This includes the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (classically called Broca's area), superior temporal sulcus (STS) and adjacent superior and middle temporal gyri, and the inferior parietal lobe (IPL) (classically called Wernicke's area) including the angular (AG) and supramarginal gyri (SMG) (4,(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18). Likewise, narrative and discourse-level aspects of signed language depend largely on right STS regions, as they do for spoken language (17,19).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural systems supporting linguistic structure, linguistic experience, and symbolic communication in sign language and gesture

Newman

Supalla

Fernandez

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sign languages used by deaf communities around the world possess the same structural and organizational properties as spoken languages: In particular, they are richly expressive and also tightly grammatically constrained. They therefore offer the opportunity to investigate the extent to which the neural organization for language is modality independent, as well as to identify ways in which modality influences this organization. The fact that sign languages share the visual-manual modality with a nonlinguistic symbolic communicative system-gesture-further allows us to investigate where the boundaries lie between language and symbolic communication more generally. In the present study, we had three goals: to investigate the neural processing of linguistic structure in American Sign Language (using verbs of motion classifier constructions, which may lie at the boundary between language and gesture); to determine whether we could dissociate the brain systems involved in deriving meaning from symbolic communication (including both language and gesture) from those specifically engaged by linguistically structured content (sign language); and to assess whether sign language experience influences the neural systems used for understanding nonlinguistic gesture. The results demonstrated that even sign language constructions that appear on the surface to be similar to gesture are processed within the left-lateralized frontal-temporal network used for spoken languages-supporting claims that these constructions are linguistically structured. Moreover, although nonsigners engage regions involved in human action perception to process communicative, symbolic gestures, signers instead engage parts of the languageprocessing network-demonstrating an influence of experience on the perception of nonlinguistic stimuli.S ign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) are natural human languages with linguistic structure. Signed and spoken languages also largely share the same neural substrates, including left hemisphere dominance revealed by brain injury and neuroimaging. At the same time, sign languages provide a unique opportunity to explore the boundaries of what, exactly, "language" is. Speech-accompanying gesture is universal (1), yet such gestures are not language-they do not have a set of structural components or combinatorial rules and cannot be used on their own to reliably convey information. Thus, gesture and sign language are qualitatively different, yet both convey symbolic meaning via the hands. Comparing them can help identify the boundaries between language and nonlinguistic symbolic communication.Despite this apparently clear distinction between sign language and gesture, some researchers have emphasized their apparent similarities. One construction that has been a focus of contention is "classifier constructions" (also called "verbs of motion"). In ASL, a verb of motion (e.g., moving in a circle) will include a root expressing the motion event, morphemes marking the manner and direction of motion (e.g., forward o...

show abstract

“…For example, when Broca's area is damaged in a hearing person, orofacial movement deficits related to speech production as well as deficits in written output are evidenced (Broca, 1861;Broca, 1865;Mohr et al, 1978). Similarly, deaf subjects with Broca's area damage have movement deficits-in their limbs rather than their mouths-related to the production of ASL (Hickok et al, 1999;Neville et al, 1997). In short, Broca's area controls language motor output, whether orofacial or limb movements are involved in that output.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%