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Description: Language acquisition presents a formidable task for infants, in which word learning is a crucial yet challenging step. Syntax (the rules for combining words into sentences) has been robustly shown to be a cue to word meaning. But how can infants access syntactic information when they are still acquiring the meanings of words? We investigate the contribution of two cues that may help infants break into the syntax and give a boost to their lexical acquisition: phrasal prosody (speech melody), and function words, both of which are accessible early in life and correlate with syntactic structure in the world’s languages. We show that 18-month-old infants use prosody and function words to recover sentences’ syntactic structure, which in turn constrains the possible meaning of novel words: participants (n = 48 in each of two experiments) interpreted a novel word as referring either to an object or an action, given its position within the prosodic-syntactic structure of sentences.