Medical Research: Dual Adaptation in Deaf Brains

The Scientist: Dual Adaptation in Deaf Brains.



The brains of people who cannot hear adapt to process vision-based language, in addition to brain changes associated with the loss of auditory input.



The brains of Deaf people reorganize not only to compensate for the loss of hearing, but also to process language from visual stimuli sign language, according to a study published today (February 12) in Nature Communications. Despite this reorganization for interpreting visual language, however, language processing is still completed in the same brain region.



“The new paper really dissected the difference between hand movements being a visual stimulus, and cognitive components of language,” said Alex Meredith, a neurobiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, who was not involved in the study.



The brain devotes different areas to interpreting various sensory stimuli, such as visual or auditory. When one sense is lost, the brain compensates by adapting to other stimuli, explained study author Velia Cardin of University College London and Linköping University in Sweden. In Deaf people, for example, “the part of the brain that before was doing audition adapts to be doing something else, which is vision and somatosensation,” she said. However, Deaf humans “don’t just have sensory deprivation,” she added they also have to learn to process a visual, rather than oral, language.



To untangle brain changes due to loss of auditory input from adaptations prompted by vision-based language, the researchers used functional MRI to look at brain activation in three groups of people: Deaf people who communicate through sign language, Deaf people who read lips but don’t understand sign language, and hearing people with no sign language experience.



The researchers showed the three groups videos of sign language and videos that held no linguistic content. The signing videos were designed to allow Cardin’s team to pinpoint which areas had reorganized to process vision-based language, as these areas would only activate in Deaf signers. In contrast, the language-free videos would allow the researchers to identify areas in Deaf brains that had adapted to the loss of auditory input, as these brain areas would activate in both Deaf groups, but not in the brains of hearing volunteers. ... Read more: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34363/title/Dual-Adaptation-in-Deaf-Brains/

Deaf People May Have Trouble Reading: Health Report

Video: A new reason for why the Deaf may have trouble reading, Health Report.



Deaf people may have no trouble communicating words through American Sign Language, or ASL. But studies of ASL users show that the average Deaf adult reads at the level of a nine-year-old.



The explanation has always been that this is because they never learned to connect letters with sounds. But a recent study shows that Deaf readers are just like other people learning to read in a second language. Linguist Jill Morford led the study. She says: "The assumption has always been that the problems with reading were educational issues with what's the right way to teach reading when you can't associate sounds with letters. But what we're finding is that all this time we've been ignoring the fact that they're actually learning a new language."



Ms. Morford is a professor at the University of New Mexico and part of a research center at Gallaudet University in Washington. Most students at Gallaudet are Deaf, the center studies how Deaf people learn and use language. Professor Morford says signers are like English learners whose first language uses a different alphabet. She says: "Anyone who has a first language that has a written system that's very different than English, like Arabic or Chinese or Russian, knows that learning to recognize and understand words in English is much more challenging than if you already speak a language that uses the same orthography. "The orthography is the written system and spelling of a language. Of course, with signers, their first language has no written system at all, just hand gestures.

Gallaudet professor Thomas Allen explains what effect this has on reading. He says: "There's a silent hearing going on ... when a hearing person reads a word. When a deaf person reads a word, there's not. They see the word and there's some kind of an orthographic representation. And some of the research in our center has shown that when Deaf readers read an English word, it activates their sign representations of those words." Signers can face the same problems as other bilingual people. Their brains have to choose between two languages all the time. Take the words "paper" and "movie." Their spelling and meaning are not at all similar. But, as Professor Allen points out, the signs for them are. To make the sign for paper," he says, "you hold one hand flat and you just lightly tap it with a flat palm on the other hand, and you do that a couple times and that means paper." Movie is very similar, except the other hand "lightly moves back and forth as if it were a flickering image on a screen."



The study appears in the journal Cognition. For VOA Special English, I'm Alex Villareal. This is the VOA Special English Health Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com.

Video by VOALearningEnglish

Rochester's Deaf Population Among Largest Per Capita in U.S.

ROCHESTER, NY. - Rochester has more Deaf and Hard of Hearing residents per capita than the national average and a larger Deaf population than many other similarly sized cities, a new report out of Rochester Institute of Technology has found.



Rochester’s sizable Deaf community has often been assumed but was never quantified until the report, written by Gerard Walter and Richard Dirmyer from RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf.



The study found other cities have more total Deaf residents per capita, but among college and working aged people, Rochester has one of the largest populations in the country. In particular, the study found Rochester has far and away the highest percentage of Deaf residents enrolled in secondary education, likely driven by NTID.



“Often times it’s difficult to understand how many people are really in the community,” said Thomas Pearson, director of the National Center for Deaf Health Research at the University of Rochester. “This has been a real challenge for anyone interested in the field.”



Using American Community Survey data, Walter and Dirmyer found there are 43,000 Deaf or Hard of Hearing residents in the Rochester metro area, about 3.7 percent of the population. That’s higher than the national average, which is 3.5 percent.



Rochester doesn’t have the highest population per capita as is often suggested, however. The report only looked at a handful of cities, but found 3.9 percent of Pittsburgh’s population is Deaf or Hard of Hearing. The authors of the report attribute that to more elderly residents living in Pittsburgh than in Rochester, and the onset of age-related deafness.



Read more: http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20120925/NEWS01/309250048/Rochester-Institute-of-Technology-deaf?odyssey=nav|head



Related News - Wham ABC: http://www.13wham.com/news/local/story/Study-Rochester-Has-Largest-Deaf-Community/NIohNf_5HkSnV30z7zDwdg.cspx



RIT-NTID News: http://www.ntid.rit.edu/news/rochester-areas-deaf-population-better-defined



RocWiki blog: http://rocwiki.org/Deaf_Community

Marlee Matlin Fears For Deaf Stem-Cell Treatment

Marlee Matlin tweets concerns about a possible stem cell cure for deafness.



British researchers have been able to rebuild nerves in the ears of gerbils, and it is believed the same technique could one day be applicable to Deaf humans. However, Oscar-winning actress Matlin, who has been Deaf since she was 18 months old, is worried about the implications of the development. Matlin has been tweeting her mixed feelings about the recently announced “stem cell cure” for deafness.



Matlin commented that millions of Deaf Americans who communicate in sign language do not regard deafness as a "handicap" or a "'disease' to cure." She posted these comments on Twitter: “Imagine how I must feel with my children with me at the grocery store and someone says "I heard there's a cure for your deafness!" Think.”



"Deafness cure" is trending. My concern is that it's bigger than a "trend." It involves people and not as simple as the 4 letters in "cure." According to The Telegraph, some Deaf people feel that they don’t need to be fixed by medical intervention. The National Association of the Deaf says that many profoundly Deaf people who sign consider themselves to be part of a unique linguistic group through sign language and a unique Deaf culture.



Matlin's comments reflect the views of many members of the Deaf community...

Read more: http://www.examiner.com/article/marlee-matlin-tweets-concerns-about-a-possible-stem-cell-cure-for-deafness

Deaf Gerbils 'Hear Again' After Stem Cell Cure

Media Video: Deaf gerbils 'hear again' after stem cell cure.



Health and science reporter, BBC News



UK researchers say they have taken a huge step forward in treating deafness after stem cells were used to restore hearing in animals for the first time.



Hearing partially improved when nerves in the ear, which pass sounds into the brain, were rebuilt in gerbils - a UK study in the journal Nature reports.



Getting the same improvement in people would be a shift from being unable to hear traffic to hearing a conversation.

Video by Beanyman62News



However, treating humans is still a distant prospect. Fergus Walsh reports.



However, in about one in 10 people with profound hearing loss, nerve cells which should pick up the signal are damaged. It is like dropping the baton after the first leg of a relay race...Read more http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19570024.



Watch BBC video http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19580117

A New Reason for Why the Deaf May Have Trouble Reading

Video: A new reason for why the Deaf may have trouble reading, Health Report.



Deaf people may have no trouble communicating words through American Sign Language, or ASL. But studies of ASL users show that the average Deaf adult reads at the level of a nine-year-old. The explanation has always been that this is because they never learned to connect letters with sounds. But a recent study shows that Deaf readers are just like other people learning to read in a second language. Linguist Jill Morford led the study. She says: "The assumption has always been that the problems with reading were educational issues with what's the right way to teach reading when you can't associate sounds with letters. But what we're finding is that all this time we've been ignoring the fact that they're actually learning a new language." Ms. Morford is a professor at the University of New Mexico and part of a research center at Gallaudet University in Washington. Most students at Gallaudet are Deaf; the center studies how Deaf people learn and use language. Professor Morford says signers are like English learners whose first language uses a different alphabet. She says: "Anyone who has a first language that has a written system that's very different than English, like Arabic or Chinese or Russian, knows that learning to recognize and understand words in English is much more challenging than if you already speak a language that uses the same orthography. "The orthography is the written system and spelling of a language. Of course, with signers, their first language has no written system at all, just hand gestures.

Gallaudet professor Thomas Allen explains what effect this has on reading. He says: "There's a silent hearing going on ... when a hearing person reads a word. When a deaf person reads a word, there's not. They see the word and there's some kind of an orthographic representation. And some of the research in our center has shown that when Deaf readers read an English word, it activates their sign representations of those words." Signers can face the same problems as other bilingual people. Their brains have to choose between two languages all the time. Take the words "paper" and "movie." Their spelling and meaning are not at all similar. But, as Professor Allen points out, the signs for them are. To make the sign for paper," he says, "you hold one hand flat and you just lightly tap it with a flat palm on the other hand, and you do that a couple times and that means paper." Movie is very similar, except the other hand "lightly moves back and forth as if it were a flickering image on a screen."



The study appears in the journal Cognition. For VOA Special English, I'm Alex Villareal. This is the VOA Special English Health Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com.

Video by VOALearningEnglish