The importance of studying prosody in the comprehension of spontaneous spoken discourse

The study of the role of prosodic breaks and pitch accents in comprehension has usually focused on sentence processing, through the use of laboratory speech produced by both trained and untrained speakers. In comparison, little attention has been paid to their role in the comprehension and production of spontaneous discourse, or to the interplay between prosodic cues and pitch accents and the generation of inferences. This article describes studies which have focused on the effects of prosodic boundaries and pitch accents in sentence comprehension. Their results suggest that prosody has an early influence in the parsing of sentences as well as the processing of the information structure of a statement. It also presents a new model of spontaneous discourse comprehension that can accommodate paralinguistic factors, like pitch andprosody, and other communication channels and their relation to cognitive processes. Stemming from the model presented, future research directions are suggested as well as the importance of including spontaneous spoken discourse materials and examining the role of prosodic cues and pitch accents in the establishment of connections among spoken statements is highlighted