Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure

Junghyun Min, Alex Warstadt, Tamar I. Regev, Tiago Pimentel, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox

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.