What role does prosody play in Spanish sentence comprehension

Prosody plays a crucial role in Spanish sentence comprehension by providing important cues that help listeners parse syntactic structures and disambiguate meanings. In Spanish, prosodic features such as intonation, pitch accents, and prosodic breaks signal differences in sentence modality (e.g., distinguishing statements from questions) and syntactic boundaries, which guide how listeners interpret sentence components. For instance, prosodic breaks can determine the attachment of relative clauses in sentences, affecting the preferred interpretation of ambiguous structures.

Additionally, the presence of typical prosody enhances neural processing related to syntax in Spanish, indicating that prosodic cues facilitate syntactic parsing and comprehension. In sentence comprehension tasks, prosodic phrasing aids in processing subject-verb agreement and overall message understanding. Prosody also helps to segment speech into meaningful units and convey information focus, which is essential for accurate sentence interpretation.

Overall, prosody in Spanish acts as a robust linguistic cue that interacts with syntax and semantics to improve sentence comprehension, especially in resolving ambiguity and structuring complex sentences. ^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}

References

• Searching High and Low: Prosodic Breaks Disambiguate Relative Clauses

• Speech prosody enhances the neural processing of syntax

• Effects of prosody on the cognitive and neural resources supporting sentence comprehension: A behavioral and lesion-symptom mapping study

• Searching High and Low: Prosodic Breaks Disambiguate Relative Clauses

• The prosodic properties of narrow information focus in Central Mexican Spanish: Pitch accents, de-emphasis and phrasing

• The perception and comprehension of L2 English sentence types: cross-linguistic influence and task effects

• Case, Word Order and Prominence: Interacting cues in language production and comprehension

• Using intonation to disambiguate meaning: The role of empathy and proficiency in L2 perceptual development

• Implicit Prosody and Cue-based Retrieval: L1 and L2 Agreement and Comprehension during Reading

• Running head: PHONOLOGICAL TYPICALITY IN PREDICTIVE CONTEXTS Phonological Typicality Influences Sentence Processing in Predictive Contexts: A Reply to Staub et al. (2009)

• Review of Issue: Primary Progressive Aphasia and Caregiver Issues

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• Unraveling the contributions of prosodic patterns and individual traits on cross-linguistic perception of Spanish sentence modality

• Unraveling the contributions of prosodic patterns and individual traits on cross-linguistic perception of Spanish sentence modality

• Searching High and Low: Prosodic Breaks Disambiguate Relative Clauses

• How prosody constrains comprehension: A limited effect of prosodic packaging.

• From pauses to clauses: Prosody facilitates learning of syntactic constituency

• Implicit Prosody and Cue-based Retrieval: L1 and L2 Agreement and Comprehension during Reading

• Are prosodic effects on sentence comprehension dependent on age?

• The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

• Reading Acquisition and Phonological Awareness: Beyond the Segmental Level

• Imitated Prosodic Fluency Predicts Reading Comprehension Ability in Good and Poor High School Readers

• Sequences of Intonation Units form a ~ 1 Hz rhythm

• The contribution of prosody to foreign accent: A study of Spanish as a foreign language