Sleep plays a crucial role in human development, particularly in early childhood. While its influence on brain function is well documented, the relationship between sleep and auditory processing in the developing brain remains underexplored. The present study aimed to investigate how sleep duration impacts cortical responses to music, focusing on children aged 5 to 10.

The development of lexical tone processing in children is shaped by both  language experience and acoustic salience. While mismatch responses (MMRs) and late  negativity (LN) components of event-related potentials (ERPs) have revealed early  sensitivity to lexical tone in monolingual children, the timeline for achieving adult-like  neural responses—particularly for acoustically distinct versus subtle tone contrasts— remains unclear. Moreover, little is known about how bilingual language experience,  especially with tonal versus non-tonal home languages, modulates this neural processing.