The role of prosody in discourse processing

The influence of prosody and its visual analog, punctuation, in text comprehension was investigated in two experiments. In the first experiment 20 subjects listened to three taped passages of equal length and difficulty varying in intonation (normal, monotonous, or altered) and were tested on tasks of text comprehension and word recognition. In the second experiment 20 new subjects read the same passages but with varying punctuation (appropriate, no punctuation, or altered) and were also tested on text comprehension and word recognition. Subjects' reading time was also recorded. ANOVA results revealed that altered prosody and punctuation affect performance in a similar fashion and seriously impair text comprehension and word recognition. This sensitivity to altered intonation suggests that linguistic prosody not only supplies redundant cues for judging sentence structure but that it also manages attentional resources to help with semantic encoding of lexical units and with the organization of linguistic information in long term memory.