Previous studies found deaf individuals showed changed activations in several frontal and occipito-temporal regions than hearing controls during phonological processing of written words.However,it is not known whether this effect is specific to phonological tasks.We found deaf individuals showed greater activation than hearing controls in right hemisphere regions (including occipito-temporal,inferior parietal and prefrontal cortices),whereas deaf individuals showed less activation in left hemisphere regions (including occipito-temporal and prefrontal cortices).These effects were found for both phonological (i.e.rhyming judgment) and semantic (i.e.relatedness judgment) tasks to written words suggesting that it is a general characteristic of deaf reading.Although most of the group differences were independent of task,we did find that some differences depended on task (i.e.putamen and prefrontal cortex) suggesting differential reliance on phonological versus semantic processing.These findings suggest that there are both of general and special characteristic involvements when deaf individuals process phonology and semantics of written words.