Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure

Abstract:While it is well-established that prosody carries crucial cues for syntactic structure, the degree and nature of correspondence between these two domains remains contested. We investigate the syntax-prosody interface through an information-theoretic lens, quantifying the interaction between prosodic features and syntactic representations as their mutual information. We provide a general-purpose framework for estimating this quantity over large speech-text corpora using multimodal language models. Our framework is structure-agnostic and modular, insofar as it can be used to measure the contributions of individual prosodic features or components of structure. We evaluate the syntax-prosody relationship for two features (word duration and inter-word pauses) across two domains--read audiobooks and spontaneous conversations--both in English. Our results demonstrate that prosody contains measurable syntactic information, with prosodic features reducing syntactic uncertainty in spontaneous conversations by up to 10.2%. Our findings offer new empirical support for several theoretical accounts of the syntax-prosody interface.

15 pages, 4 figures. EMNLP 2026 camera-ready

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2608.30260 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.30260v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.30260 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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