Speech Prosody

Prosody encompasses the dynamic elements of spoken discourse, namely the prosodies intonation, tone, word and noun-phrase stresses, sentence stress, speech rhythm, quality, pauses, duration, tempo of speech, and phonological processes. The word dynamic appears in italics to call to the attention that there is a sharp difference between sounds in actual discourse and static sounds and sounds produced in isolation. Real speech is not a series of static speech events. Sound segments as one sees them in sound charts are static, and rarely if ever, occur in actual discourse in the way they are presented in charts. But they are useful as reference in traditional representations of speech sounds.