The goal of our study is to use an automatic approach to extract the general prosodic tendency of the speech signal conveyed by the F0 pattern and the syllable duration. The speech signal is prosodically annotated by an automatic prosodic transcriber and then prosodic patterns are extracted from this annotation. The pertinence of the pattern extraction is tested here on laboratory data containing isolated sentences in French and English uttered by native and non-native speakers. An analysis of the extracted parameters allows observing how the prosody of the sentences is defined by their shared syntactic structures and to what extend are the prosodic features used by the two languages different or similar. It appears from the analyzed data that such an automatic prosodic parameter processing can yield relevant information for a cross-linguistic study of the prosody.