TY - JOUR TI - Early language exposure affects neural mechanisms of semantic representations AU - Wang, Xiaosha AU - Wang, Bijun AU - Bi, Yanchao A2 - Peelle, Jonathan Erik A2 - de Lange, Floris P A2 - Reilly, Jamie A2 - Fairhall, Scott Laurence VL - 12 PY - 2023 DA - 2023/05/10 SP - e81681 C1 - eLife 2023;12:e81681 DO - 10.7554/eLife.81681 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.81681 AB - One signature of the human brain is its ability to derive knowledge from language inputs, in addition to nonlinguistic sensory channels such as vision and touch. How does human language experience modulate the mechanism by which semantic knowledge is stored in the human brain? We investigated this question using a unique human model with varying amounts and qualities of early language exposure: early deaf adults who were born to hearing parents and had reduced early exposure and delayed acquisition of any natural human language (speech or sign), with early deaf adults who acquired sign language from birth as the control group that matches on nonlinguistic sensory experiences. Neural responses in a semantic judgment task with 90 written words that were familiar to both groups were measured using fMRI. The deaf group with reduced early language exposure, compared with the deaf control group, showed reduced semantic sensitivity, in both multivariate pattern (semantic structure encoding) and univariate (abstractness effect) analyses, in the left dorsal anterior temporal lobe (dATL). These results provide positive, causal evidence that language experience drives the neural semantic representation in the dATL, highlighting the roles of language in forming human neural semantic structures beyond nonverbal sensory experiences. KW - dorsal anterior temporal lobe KW - fMRI KW - knowledge KW - language KW - semantics JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -