Intro; The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition; Editorial page; Title page'; LCC data; Table of contents; 1. Introduction; Early sensitivity to prosody; Learning to produce prosody; Moving to meaning and interaction: Prosody and pragmatic development; Directions for future research; Acknowledgements; References; Part 1. Early sensitivity to prosody; 2. Early perception of phrasal prosody and its role in syntactic and lexical acquisition; Introduction; Early perception of prosodic cues; Using phrasal prosody to segment the speech stream into words.

The role of phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing in childrenConclusions; Acknowledgements; Funding; References; 3. Early sensitivity and acquisition of prosodic patterns at the lexical level; Introduction; From language-general to language-specific processing of lexical stress; Discrimination of word-level stress patterns; Acquisition of lexical stress patterns; An attempt at dissociating the acoustic correlates of stress; ; Bilingualism and lexical stress; Bilingual infants' discrimination of lexical stress patterns; Bilingual infants' preference for native prosodic patterns.

Beyond lexical stress: Lexical pitch accents and lexical tonesLexical pitch accents; Lexical tones; Lexical stress and word form segmentation; Concluding remarks; Funding; Acknowledgements; References; 4. The role of prosody in early word learning; Introduction; Word learning components and the role of prosody; Segmentation; Referent/object identification; Mapping linguistic form to meaning; Integrative approaches to word learning; Acknowledgements; References; 5. The role of prosody in early speech segmentation and word-referent mapping; Introduction.

The method of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in language acquisition researchWord segmentation; ERP indicators of word segmentation; Language-specific prosodic cues to word segmentation: lexical stress patterns; Properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) supporting word segmentation: Prosodic emphasis on sentence-embedded words; From IDS to song: How early can melodic cues contribute to word segmentation?; Word-referent mapping; ERP indicators of word-referent mapping; The contribution of prosody to word-referent mapping: From behavioral to ERP studies; Conclusions; Acknowledgements.