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

Research suggests that infants may be sensitive to the prosodic structure o f their native language at an earlier age than the segmental structure. In adults, the right cerebral hemisphere is more involved than the left in pro cessing certain types of prosodic information. A hypothesis derived from th ese 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 pass ages (languages with similar prosodic structure) were used to test this hyp othesis in 3-month-old infants (n = 24). Significant differences in ERP amp litude measures indicated that both left and right cerebral hemispheres wer e sensitive to differences between English and the 2 foreign languages, and that both pi ay a role in processing speech in the early stages of languag e acquisition.