ABSTRACT
The lived sensory and linguistic experiences of deaf people are fascinating from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience and neuroplasticity. Early on in her career, Helen Neville began studying the neurophysiological impacts of deafness and sign language use on reading, then visual perception and attention. Deafness and the use of sign language presented unique opportunities to study neuroplasticity in humans to understand how unimodal sensory deprivation and/or the use of a visual language affects brain development. Helen’s research brought her and her students into contact with Deaf culture. In this chapter, we revisit Helen’s pioneering research into neuroplasticity and describe how it inspired our own work and stimulated the field. Helen’s work in this area literally established two fields that are the focus of this chapter: neuroplastic reorganization of function stemming from deafness, and the neural organization of sign language. We review this work and then show how Helen’s work can help understand and resolve a controversy of great relevance to deaf people and their families – whether deaf children who receive cochlear implants to restore hearing should be exposed to sign language.
