Attentional engagement during syllable discrimination: The role of salient prosodic cues in 6- to 8-month-old infants

•Prosodic cues guide lexical acquisition from early infancy.•Syllables with longer duration, more amplitude and higher pitch help 6-month-old infants to discriminate changes at the segmental level.•Pupil dilation and looking-while-listening times offer insights into the interplay of attentional mechanisms and prosodic processing in infancy.•Prosodic saliency, the time-course of the speech stimulus and familiarity with the native-language stress pattern guide attentional resource allocation.