The ontogeny of linguistic functions in the human brain remains elusive. Although some auditory capacities are described before term, whether and how such immature cortical circuits might process speech are unknown. Here we used functional optical imaging to evaluate the cerebral responses to syllables at the earliest age at which cortical responses to external stimuli can be recorded in humans (28-to 32-wk gestational age). At this age, the cortical organization in layers is not completed. Many neurons are still located in the subplate and in the process of migrating to their final location. Nevertheless, we observed several points of similarity with the adult linguistic network. First, whereas syllables elicited larger right than left responses, the posterior temporal region escaped this general pattern, showing faster and more sustained responses over the left than over the right hemisphere. Second, discrimination responses to a change of phoneme (ba vs. ga) and a change of human voice (male vs. female) were already present and involved inferior frontal areas, even in the youngest infants (29-wk gestational age). Third, whereas both types of changes elicited responses in the right frontal region, the left frontal region only reacted to a change of phoneme. These results demonstrate a sophisticated organization of perisylvian areas at the very onset of cortical circuitry, 3 mo before term. They emphasize the influence of innate factors on regions involved in linguistic processing and social communication in humans.hemodynamic response | premature human brain | language | hemispheric lateralization | near infrared spectroscopy S hortly after birth, human infants already exhibit a variety of sophisticated linguistic capacities, from discriminating syllables and human languages (1) to remembering short stories (2). These capacities rely on a set of perisylvian brain areas similar to the one described in adults, involving temporal but also frontal areas (3), with significant asymmetries favoring the left hemisphere at the level of the planum temporale (4, 5). Because audition is already functional during the last months of pregnancy (6), it is still debated whether evolution has endowed humans with a genetically determined cortical organization particularly suitable to process speech or whether fast learning quickly specializes the auditory network toward speech processing during this initial period (7). In the present work, to inform this debate, we examined the functional organization of the perisylvian areas at the onset of cortical circuitry in preterm infants.Neuronal migration is still on its way during the last trimester of human gestation. The majority of the neurons still lie in the subplate, and the six-layered lamination of the cortex becomes fully visible only after 32-wk gestational age (wGA) (8). The first contacts of the thalamo-cortical fibers establish with subplate neurons (9). The first synapses appear in the cortical plate around 26 wGA, with a massive relocation of the afferent fibers from the...