A study investigated whether young children use sentence accent to mark new information as systematically as they have been shown to handle contrastive stress within naturally-occurring discourse. Data were drawn from the spontaneous conversations of a boy-and-girl twin pair with adults. The twins' speech was coded in carefully-defined categories in an effort to overcome methodological problems. The findings suggest that by this age, the two children had made an important connection between their prosodic and pragmatic systems, using sentence accent to mark the distinction between old and new information in an appropriate way more than 85 percent of the time, and using contrastive stress appropriately over 90 percent of the time. The children's use of self-correction corroborated these conclusions. (MSE)