THE task-dependent laterality of the auditory cortices was investigated by measuring the magnetic fields elicited by three forms of a Japanese verb, which differed in terms of prosodic and phonetic cues. Significant task- dependent magnetic fields were found in both hemispheres during a prosody-related task, but only in the left during a phoneme-related task. The latency was similar to the mismatch negatively which reflects the neural activity of automatic cue decoding. These results suggest that task-dependent schemata are activated at least partially in parallel with automatic cue-decoding processes such that those in the left hemisphere process linguistic information irrespective of acoustic cues whereas those in the right hemisphere process prosodic information.