The role of prosody in discourse processing

The influence of prosody and its visual analog, punctuation, in text compre hension was investigated in two experiments. In the first experiment 20 sub jects listened to three taped passages of equal length and difficulty varyi ng 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 simil ar fashion and seriously impair text comprehension and word recognition. Th is sensitivity to altered intonation suggests that linguistic prosody not o nly supplies redundant cues For judging sentence structure but that it also manages attentional resources to help with semantic encoding of lexical un its and with the organization of linguistic information in long term memory . (C) 2001 Academic Press.