ABSTRACT
A salient argument motivating the idea that prosody is used as a boot-strapping mechanism for the first-language learner acquiring syntactic structure is the observation that prosodic groupings often seem to match syntactic ones. In this chapter, we examine this argument by comparing the prosodic systems and the relationship between prosody and syntax in three languages—Japanese, Korean, and English. We conclude that, although we have little specific evidence about their role in acquisition, the complexity of the mappings, and the arbitrary language-specific aspects of the mappings, in particular, make it seem unlikely that the child can have them innately to use as an aid in syntactic acquisition except in the most general sense that groupings and prominence are universal cognitive categories.
