How can people make sense of the prosody of an utterance when prosody plays so many roles?

As experience with a poor speech synthesizer readily demonstrates, a spoken sentence is quite different from the mere concatenation of sounds or syllables: Its prosody groups syllables and words together and renders some elements more prominent than others. Characterizing the roles that phrasing and prominence play has been quite complex because they reflect each of the sentence’s linguistic structures–phonological, syntactic, information, pragmatic.

For example, people share the intuition that the segmentally identical phrases ‘crisis turnip’ and ‘cry sister nip’ can be distinguished from each other based on the way the phrases sound. Likewise, the sentences ‘Raoul murdered the man with a gun’ or ‘I asked the teacher who left’ have more than one literal meaning: Did Raoul use a gun to kill or did he kill the man who was holding a gun? Did I ask the teacher the question “Who left?” or has the teacher to whom I asked a question left? In each case, differences in phrasing and prominence can disambiguate the sentence’s meaning.

The simultaneous influence of prosody on multiple linguistic structures raises a challenge for theories of language processing. The Dahan lab has made important contributions to research on prosody by reporting demonstrations of listeners’ immediate uptake of prosodic information during language processing and by providing reviews of the state of the art in the linguistics and psycholinguistics fields.

Selected references:

Reviews

Dahan, D., & Ferreira, F. (2019). Language comprehension: Insights from research on spoken language. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human Language: from Genes and Brains to Behavior. MIT Press.
Dahan, D. (2015). Prosody and language processing. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 6, 441-452.

Empirical reports

Pycha, A. & Dahan, D. (2016). Differences in coda voicing trigger temporal realignment of gestures: A test case from the American English diphthong /aI/. Journal of Phonetics, 56, 15-37.
Salverda, A. P., Dahan, D., Tanenhaus, M. K., Crosswhite, K., Masharov, M., & McDonough, J. (2007). Effects of prosodically-modulated sub-phonetic variations on lexical competition. Cognition, 105, 466–476
Salverda, A. P., Dahan, D., & McQueen, J. M. (2003). The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension. Cognition, 90, 51-89.
Dahan, D., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Chambers, C. G. (2002). Accent and reference resolution in spoken-language comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 292-314.