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Purpose: The fine-tuning of linguistic prosody in later childhood is poorly understood, and its neurological processing is even less well studied. In particular, it is unknown if grammatical processing of prosody is left- or rightlateralized in childhood versus adulthood and how phonological working memory might modulate such lateralization. Furthermore, it is virtually unknown how prosody develops neurologically among children with cochlear implants (CIs). Method: 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 (declarative, question, with or without narrow focus). Children also completed standard measures of expressive and receptive language. Results: Age group differences emerged; 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--an area that was generally more activated in adults than in children. Conclusions: The prosody-related findings are generally consistent with prior neurodevelopmental works on sentence comprehension, especially those involving syntax and semantics, which have also noted a developmental shift from bilateral temporal to left inferior frontal regions typically associated with increased sensitivity to sentence structure. The findings thus inform theoretical perspectives on brain and language development and have implications for studying the effects of CIs on neurodevelopmental processes for sentence prosody

Individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) display an unusual cognitive profile with severe deficits in spatial skills along with fluent and arguably complex language. Our experiment focused on the comprehension of scalar expressions, such as `some', `two', and `or' as a window to study their semantic and pragmatic competence. We compared performance of individuals with WS (mean age = 16,4 (year, month), age range = 11,10-21,11) to children matched by Mental Age (MA, (mean age = 6,1, age range = 5,2-7,8) and typical adults. No differences between the WS and MA groups were found in their knowledge of truth conditions of scalar terms. We further tested whether participants accept the statements with scalar terms in contexts featuring their logical (semantic) readings. Individuals with WS accepted logical readings more often than children matched by MA, suggesting that individuals with WS have access to the abstract meaning of scalar expressions.