Electrophysiological indices of cerebral specialization and the role of prosody in language acquisition in 3‐month‐old infants

Abstract

Research suggests that infants may be sensitive to the prosodic structure of their native language at an earlier age than the segmental structure. In adults, the right cerebral hemisphere is more involved than the left in processing certain types of prosodic information. A hypothesis derived from these 2 research findings is that similar right hemisphere specialization for prosodic information would be found in infants. Event‐related potentials (ERPs) recorded to tone probes superimposed on English and Italian passages (languages with different prosodic structure) and on English and Dutch passages (languages with similar prosodic structure) were used to test this hypothesis in 3‐month‐old infants (n = 24). Significant differences in ERP amplitude measures indicated that both left and right cerebral hemispheres were sensitive to differences between English and the 2 foreign languages, and that both play a role in processing speech in the early stages of language acquisition.