The field of early language acquisition has explored how infants and toddlers begin to understand and produce language, with a significant focus on their sensitivity to prosody, namely to rhythm, prominence and intonation. Prosody provides essential bootstrapping mechanisms that help infants to scaffold the learning of language, facilitating the tasks of segmenting speech and deriving meaning, even before they master specific sounds and vocabulary. Current understanding of the perception of prosody emphasizes its multisensory nature, where auditory information is enhanced by visual and tactile inputs, and coupled to speech motor information. There remains a gap, however, in understanding how these multisensory integrations develop, whether they might differ across languages with varying prosodic systems and across typically and atypically developing populations, such as children at risk for language impairments.

This Research Topic aims to unravel the complex processes underpinning multisensory integration in the development of prosody. Key objectives include exploring how children acquire and mentally represent prosodic structures across different languages, cultural and environmental contexts, assessing the role of multisensory processes and multimodality in prosodic acquisition and language development, establishing prosodic precursors in language development, identifying prosodic markers indicative of potential language impairments, and considering how these findings might improve educational and clinical assessments. Achieving these goals will involve interdisciplinary approaches that integrate behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, and computational analyses.

To gather further insights into multisensory integration and neural dynamics in prosodic acquisition, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
· Behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying multisensory perception of prosody in early human development
· Multisensory integration in prosodic acquisition and its effects on language development
· Acquisition of multimodal prosody
· Identification and use of early prosodic markers for atypical language development
· Crosslinguistic, cross-cultural and environmental or individual variations in multisensory integration in prosodic acquisition
· Translational impacts on assessment tools and interventions for language and communication in infants, toddlers and young children Submissions may include behavioral, computational, and neurophysiological studies, utilizing paradigms such as perceptual tasks, neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG, fMRI), multisensory processing analyses, and interdisciplinary approaches combining linguistics, psychology, developmental cognitive science, and clinical research.

We encourage authors from different perspectives and disciplines to submit Original Research articles, Brief Research Reports, systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Interdisciplinary perspectives are strongly encouraged.

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Multisensory Integration and Neural Dynamics in Prosodic Acquisition