Ausaf Ahmed Farooqui and colleagues have published “Do non-language regions become language regions? The case of deprived sensory cortices” in Brain (July 2026).
In people born blind or deaf, the unused visual or auditory cortex becomes active during language tasks, and many studies have taken this as a sign that these regions take on language processing. This study tests that claim with congenitally blind and deaf participants, sign-language-using children of deaf parents, and sighted and hearing controls, separating language processing from the sensory and general task demands that accompany it. The answer bears on a central question in brain plasticity: whether a brain region can change its specialization.
Authors: Ayşe Betül Varol, Tamer Gezici, Şehmus Kurt, Yasemin Güçlütürk, Mohini Verma, Ausaf Ahmed Farooqui