Reading ability in both deaf and hearing adults is linked to neural representations of abstract phonology derived from visual speech

Abstract

Title: Significance Reading is an essential skill, yet some deaf children face reading challenges due to reduced access to signed or spoken language. In hearing children, successful reading depends on abstract phonological representations, but whether spoken language phonology relates to reading in deaf individuals remains unclear. Using fMRI and RSA, we show that deaf and hearing adults recruit neural representations of spoken language phonology that are shared by visual speech and other language forms in the superior and middle temporal cortex. Critically, greater cross-modal alignment of neural representations of phonological structure was associated with better reading in both groups. These findings provide neurobiological evidence that visual speech contributes to spoken language phonological representations that relate to reading, regardless of hearing status.