Cochlear implant users with poor speech understanding show little left-hemisphere language activity.

Evidence

Figure 2 illustrates the task-related activation pattern evoked by audiovisual sentences, comparing the mean pattern from a group of 10 NH listeners to example patterns from two individual CI users with good and poor speech understanding. All NH listeners showed a similar activation pattern in wide language-associated regions in both hemispheres with asymmetry favouring the left hemisphere. The CI user with good speech understanding (100 % correct sentences in quiet) shows a generally similar pattern to that of the NH listeners, with left hemisphere dominance but greater activation in frontal areas (Broca’s). In contrast, the CI user with poor speech understanding (< 50 % correct) has very little significant left-hemisphere activity, and little activation out of primary and associated auditory areas. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4307

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to hemispheric lateralization of language and how deprivation reshapes it — relates to the reader’s work on normal hearing physiology and cognition.