Experimental and theoretical advances in prosody: A review

Abstract

Research on prosody has recently become an important focus in various disciplines, including Linguistics, Psychology, and Computer Science. This article reviews recent research advances on two key issues: prosodic phrasing and prosodic prominence. Both aspects of prosody are influenced by linguistic factors such as syntactic constituent structure, semantic relations, phonological rhythm, pragmatic considerations, and also by processing factors such as the length, complexity, or predictability of linguistic material. Our review summarises recent insights into the production and perception of these two components of prosody and their grammatical underpinnings. While this review only covers a subset of a broader set of research topics on prosody in cognitive science, these topics are representative of a tendency in the field towards a more interdisciplinary approach.

Keywords:

• Prosody
• Intonation
• Comprehension
• Production

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Mara Breen, Ted Gibson, and Laura Dilley for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The first author was supported by FQRSC Grant NP-132516, SSHRC Canada Research Chair 212482, and NSF Grant 0642660, and the second author by NIH Grant R01DC008774 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders during the writing of this paper.

Notes

¹Boundary tones also play an important role in negotiating turn-taking. We will not discuss these discourse functions of boundary tones in this review, because our main focus is how boundaries are signaled.