Abstract
Development of phonemic and emotional cerebral laterality effects in right-handed preschoolers with a dichotic listening task was investigated. Pairs of Japanese famil- ial names differing only in the initial syllable in different emotional tones were presented dichotically. While a right ear advantage was found in detecting a specific name, a left ear advantage was found in detecting a specific emotional tone. We found neither age nor sex effects on these laterality patterns. These results suggested that while the right hemisphere was specialized for mediating emotional prosodic features, the left hemisphere was specialized for processing phonemes as early as 4 years of age.
