Despite their partially distinctive neural substrates, in typical adults language and emotion function together as well-integrated communicative systems. Both patient and neuroimaging research has furthered our knowledge of the brain organization underlying language and emotion, yet we know little about how this organization develops. In this chapter we discuss the initial state of brain organization for language and emotion, and how these systems develop and change over developmental time. We address these topics by investigating patterns of language and emotion processing in a population of infants and young children with unilateral perinatal strokes. Our studies reveal gradients of neural plasticity across language and emotion communicative systems, with relatively greater neural plasticity for language compared to emotion-processing.