The Development of Left Hemisphere Lateralization for Sentence-Level Prosodic Processing

‘The fine-tuning of linguistic prosody in later childhood is poorly understood, and its neurological processing is even less well studied. Normal-hearing (NH) children ages 6–12 years and NH adults ages 18–28 years completed a functional near-infrared spectroscopy neuroimaging task, during which they heard sentence pairs and judged whether the sentences did or did not differ in their overall prosody. Results showed age group differences; children exhibited stronger bilateral temporoparietal activity but reduced left frontal activation. Furthermore, children’s performance on a nonword repetition test was significantly associated with activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus.

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