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Prosody and language comprehension.

Delphine Dahan1

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. Cognitive Science
|August 13, 2015
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

This review explores how prosody, the rhythm and intonation of speech, aids language comprehension. It influences word segmentation, syntactic structure, and the highlighting of information within sentences.

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Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Phonetics

Background:

  • Prosody, characterized by tonal elements and alignment with segmental composition, influences phonological, syntactic, and informational sentence structures.
  • Listeners are demonstrably affected by prosody during the establishment of linguistic structures.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To review recent advances in understanding prosody's role in language comprehension.
  • To synthesize evidence on how prosody impacts utterance segmentation, syntactic parsing, and information structure marking.

Main Methods:

  • Literature review of recent advances in prosody research.
  • Analysis of studies investigating the influence of prosody on linguistic structure formation.

Main Results:

  • Prosody significantly impacts the segmentation of speech into syllables and words.
  • Evidence is discussed regarding the relationship between syntax and prosody, including direct versus complex interface views.
  • Prosody plays a crucial role in marking sentence information structure, highlighting key elements and conveying attitudes.

Conclusions:

  • Prosody is integral to language comprehension, influencing multiple levels of linguistic processing.
  • Ongoing research aims to identify specific prosodic elements that mark information structure dimensions.