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The papers in this special issue reflect an increase in research interest in the use of intonation and prosody in the processing of spoken sentences. As more is learned about sentence processing and as increased attention is paid to the processing of the spoken language, so researchers have begun to ask questions about the organizational principles of the spoken form. This book covers a range of such questions, of interest both to linguists and to psycholinguists. It considers aspects of the linguistics characterization of prosody, such as whether prosodic structures are themselves often ambiguous and in need of parsing. It also includes studies of the use of prosody in the structural interpretation of sentences, involving the relationship between intonational focus and sentence structure, the role of prosody in structural disambiguation, and the predictive use of prosody in determining the length of the current utterance. Papers in the collection also consider the role of prosody in the early acquisition of grammar, the lateralization of prosody in the brain, and the extent to which prosody can be claimed to guide rather than support syntactic structural analysis.
Abstract: "We describe the modification of a grammar to take advantage of prosodic information provided by a speech recognition system. This initial study is limited to the use of relative duration of phonetic segments in the assignment of syntactic structure, specifically in ruling out alternative parses in otherwise ambiguous sentences. Taking advantage of prosodic information in parsing can make a spoken language system more accurate and more efficient, if prosodic-syntactic mismatches, or unlikely matches, can be pruned. We know of no other work that has succeeded in automatically extracting speech information and using it in a parser to rule out extraneous parses."
Top researchers in prosody and psycholinguistics present their research and their views on the role of prosody in processing speech and also its role in reading. The volume characterizes the state of the art in an important area of psycholinguistics. How are general constraints on prosody (‘timing’) and intonation (‘melody’) used to constrain the parsing and interpretation of spoken language? How are they used to assign a default prosody/intonation in silent reading, and more generally what is the role of phonology in reading? Prosody and intonation interact with phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and thus are at the very core of language processes.
Prosody is the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech, which encodes information that is not encoded by the syntax or words of an utterance. Prosody is critical for parsing speech, constructing syntactic structure, and building a representation of the conversational discourse model, among other linguistic functions. In 2008, researchers from linguistics, psychology and computer science gathered at the inaugural meeting of the conference on Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody at Cornell University. The papers in this volume represent the cutting edge of the prosody work presented at that conference. The articles in this special issue tackle a number of key questions: What type of information about syntax, semantics, and context is reflected in prosody and intonation? How much of that information can a listener retrieve from the signal? How does this information facilitate language processing in online conversations? How can this information be used to parse corpora, and how can corpora be used to test theories on prosody?