This study deals with the relationship between music and language (prosody) in the light of a case study focused on Álex, a hyperlexic and minimally verbal autistic child. In comparison with a control group, his ability to auditorily discriminate pairs of rhythmic and melodic (music) as well as prosodic stimuli (declarative, interrogative and exclamative utterances, in normal series and jabberwocky, i.e., structure without meaning) is assessed. His capacity to associate an auditory utterance with the corresponding punctuation mark is also tested. Álex is similar to controls in melody discrimination but inferior in rhythm and utterance discrimination, which is optimal in controls. He scores close to controls in the association prosody-punctuation mark, in jabberwocky utterances. The results suggest that components of musicality such as melody and rhythm, present in Álex, are probably primitive constituents of human auditory perception that can be linguistically non-functional if they have not been integrated into spoken communication early in development.