Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure

arXiv:2608.30260 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-08-31 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-08-31

Updated: 2026-08-31

Comments: 15 pages, 4 figures. EMNLP 2026 camera-ready

Code: https://github.com/aatlantise/prosody-syntax-interface

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: 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.

Terminology

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.

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