Behavioral data establish a dramatic change in infants' phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months of age. Foreign-language phonetic discrimination significantly declines with increasing age. Using a longitudinal design, we examined the electrophysiological responses of 7- and 11-month-old American infants to native and non-native consonant…

A study of differential brain hemisphere involvement in second language acquisition is reported. The study examined the idea that the right hemisphere is progressively more involved the later the second language is acquired. Various techniques for monitoring hemispheric functioning are described, especially the Evoked Potential (EP) technique. In…

Current neuroimaging and neurophysiologic techniques have substantially increased our possibilities to study processes related to various language functions in the intact human brain. Learning to read and write influences the functional organization of the brain. What is universal and what is specific in the languages of the world are important…