Where does prosody collide?

In linguistics and phonetics, prosody is the set of features of speech that ride above the individual consonants and vowels: the pitch, loudness, timing, and stress patterns that give an utterance its melody and rhythm, and that signal whether it is a question or a statement, which word is in focus, and how the speaker feels. Cutler, Dahan, and van Donselaar's 1997 review Prosody in the Comprehension of Spoken Language gathered the evidence that listeners use these features to recognise words, parse sentences, and follow discourse. The referent is a physical, measurable property of the speech stream, tracked in pitch and duration, and not the scholarly study of verse on a page or a patient's lost emotional intonation after a stroke.[1]

Unit

The pitch, stress, and timing pattern spanning a syllable, word, or phrase of speech

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Measured acoustically from the speech signal as fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity contours

In poetics and literary studies, prosody is the theory and study of versification: the systematic analysis of how a poem's meter, rhythm, and rhyme are built and scanned. It is a body of scholarship and a set of conventions for describing verse, running from classical foot-based meters to modern accentual and free-verse rhythms. Fussell's 1979 Poetic Meter and Poetic Form is a standard account of how English meter is scanned and how metrical form carries meaning. The referent is a scholarly discipline that analyses patterned language in poems, not a physical property of any one spoken utterance or a clinical ability that can be damaged.[2]

Unit

A metrical or rhythmic description of a line or poem, such as a scansion

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by scanning verse into feet, stresses, and rhyme schemes and comparing them against metrical conventions

In clinical neurology, prosody names the emotional melody of speech as a brain function that can be selectively lost, and its impairment is called aprosodia. Damage to the right hemisphere can leave a patient able to speak grammatically yet unable to put feeling into the voice or to hear it in others, so speech becomes flat and its emotional tone is missed. Ross's 1981 The Aprosodias mapped these deficits onto right-hemisphere regions that mirror the left-hemisphere language areas. The referent is a neurological capacity and its disorders in real patients, diagnosed at the bedside, not an acoustic property of speech in general or the study of poetic meter.[3]

Unit

A patient's ability to produce or comprehend the emotional tone of speech

Recovery means

Some function may return during recovery after right-hemisphere stroke, though deficits can persist

Measured by

Assessed clinically by tasks of producing and identifying emotional intonation, and localised by lesion imaging