Do newborns detect prosodic violations in an unfamiliar language at birth?

Experience with language starts prenatally, as the intrauterine environment allows speech prosody to get through. Martinez-Alvarez and colleagues (2023) demonstrated that newborns detect utterance-level prosodic violations in the language they heard prenatally, French. It remains unknown, however, whether this discrimination ability requires prenatal experience with a given language or whether newborns have an early sensitivity to the shapes of prosodic contours that extends beyond prenatal experience. To this purpose, we tested infants exposed prenatally to Italian with the French stimuli of Martinez-Alvarez et al. (2023), and we measured their brain responses with fNIRS. We found that Italian-exposed newborns discriminate between standard and deviant prosodic contours in French, activating right hemispheric areas specialized for the processing of prosody in adults. However, the time course and the localization of the effect were different from those found in French newborns. This suggests that an early sensitivity to prosodic contours may be modulated by prenatal experience at birth.