Neural discrimination of emotional prosody in natural sentences in 2- to 3-month-old infants using OPM-MEG

In 2–3-month-old infants, OPM-MEG decoding discriminates happy versus angry prosody in natural sentences 346–454 ms after the pitch-peak word onset.

• Why it matters: It is unclear when the infant brain begins to distinguish emotions in natural speech, despite early sensitivity to emotional prosody from birth.
• What they did: Brain activity was recorded in 15 infants (2–3 months) using OPM-MEG while they heard semantically neutral sentences spoken with happy or angry prosody, then analyzed with time-resolved multivariate pattern analysis.
• The result: Discrimination was transient, occurred before sentence end, and relied mainly on phase-locked delta-band activity, with later induced alpha-power differences and angry prosody delaying the late auditory response by ~15 ms.

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