AbstractProsody influences speech organization by signaling phrasal prominence, grouping patterns, and speakers’ pragmaticintentions. While traditionally viewed as restricted to speech, research shows prosody is also conveyed visually. This articlereviews research showing strong parallels between spoken prosody and co-speech gestures in prominence marking, grouping phrasalstructures, and signaling pragmatic intent. We extend this discussion and propose a modality-neutral prosodic framework hypothesiscomprising three propositions: (a) prosody should be viewed as a modality-neutral grammar component that operates as an abstractlevel of representation while adapting to different sensory channels and language modalities; (b) in spoken languages, prosody isimplemented flexibly through two distinct channels, spoken and gestural, which enable to mark prominence, grouping and meaning ina multimodal way; (c) parallel implementations are found in the way prosody is manifested in spoken and sign languages. Amodality-neutral view of prosody will enrich current formal and developmental theories of language.