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Blindness reorganizes the cortical network beyond the occipital cortex for lexical tone perception

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Qiuhai Yue¹, Linjun Zhang²; ¹School of Psychology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China, ²School of Chinese as a Second Language, Peking University, Beijing, China

Previous research indicates that sensory loss (e.g., blindness) often alters information processing in remaining modalities, yet the neural mechanisms underlying such cross-modal plasticity remain unclear. Using fMRI, we examined the neural bases of Mandarin lexical tone perception in sighted controls (SC, n=25) and congenitally blind (CB, n=34) adults. Participants performed a tone categorization task during scanning, identifying which of the four lexical tones a given sound represented via manual response. Behaviorally, both groups showed high and comparable accuracy. However, the CB group responded significantly faster (~200 ms) and exhibited a distinct response time pattern across tone conditions compared to the SC group. Neuroimaging results revealed that while the SC group engaged a typical network for lexical tone perception – including bilateral superior temporal cortices, left inferior frontal gyri (IFGs), and motor areas – the CB group showed altered activation patterns: they did not recruit left IFG but instead activated a set of visual areas including left V5. Time-resolved activation analyses revealed shorter neural response durations in temporal regions in the CB group, paralleling their faster behavioral responses. Multivoxel pattern analysis showed that left V5 discriminated tone categories exclusively in the CB group, and representational similarity analysis indicated its role in encoding pitch height. Functional connectivity analysis further revealed enhanced temporal–occipital coupling in the CB group, contrasting with stronger temporal–frontal connectivity in SC. These findings indicate that congenital blindness leads to a systemic functional reorganization, whereby visual areas become engaged in auditory feature representation during lexical tone processing.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Audition