Whether in read, silent reading or spontaneous speech, the prosodic structure is always present as an obligatory linguistic object in order to allow the listener to process the information brought by the flow of syllables and access the syntactic information contained in the sentence. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the elaboration of the prosodic structuration necessarily present in the sentence actually precedes the elaboration of the other structures and particularly of the syntactic structure, whether in the generation process by the speaker or the perception process by the listener. Arguments favoring this conclusion are of various order and are based on the following facts:- The prosodic structure can exist without any w...