Using MRI to characterize the anatomy and function of the auditory cortex in infancy.

An extended body of behavioral work has described the auditory skills of infants, but the neural basis of these skills has remained largely unexplored. Recently, noninvasive brain imaging techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), have been successfully used from the first hours after birth, providing informative data on auditory processing and its anatomic underpinnings. The goal of this paper is to examine this increasing body of data, focusing on a basic aspect of auditory processing that has attracted considerable attention and is starting to be elucidated: the hemispheric specialization for the processing of complex auditory stimuli. We will briefly discuss the peculiarities of MRI techniques applied to the infant brain, and review the anatomic and functional evidence for the existence and weighting of hemispheric asymmetry for auditory processing in infancy.