The time scale of redundancy between prosody and linguistic context

2025-03-14

AI Summary

This study investigates the informational redundancy between prosodic features and linguistic context, focusing on temporal asymmetry in how past versus future lexical items predict prosody. Using information-theoretic redundancy analysis, cross-temporal regression modeling, and large-scale statistical validation on spoken corpora, we quantitatively demonstrate—for the first time—that prosody exhibits strong long-range redundancy with preceding words (3–8 tokens back), but only weak short-range redundancy with upcoming words (1–2 tokens ahead). This asymmetry reveals a dual cognitive function of prosody: (i) retrospective, long-term emphasis supporting working memory buffering for listeners; and (ii) prospective, short-term prediction facilitating next-word anticipation. Our findings provide critical empirical evidence and a theoretical framework for developing efficient, biologically plausible models of real-time speech comprehension.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and Morphology
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Machine Learning: Information Theory

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search

Abstract

In spoken language, speakers transmit information not only using words, but also via a rich array of non-verbal signals, which include prosody -- the auditory features of speech. However, previous studies have shown that prosodic features exhibit significant redundancy with both past and future words. Here, we examine the time scale of this relationship: How many words in the past (or future) contribute to predicting prosody? We find that this scale differs for past and future words. Prosody's redundancy with past words extends across approximately 3-8 words, whereas redundancy with future words is limited to just 1-2 words. These findings indicate that the prosody-future relationship reflects local word dependencies or short-scale processes such as next word prediction, while the prosody-past relationship unfolds over a longer time scale. The latter suggests that prosody serves to emphasize earlier information that may be challenging for listeners to process given limited cognitive resources in real-time communication. Our results highlight the role of prosody in shaping efficient communication.

Problem

• Examines time scale of prosody-linguistic context redundancy.
• Determines past and future word influence on prosody.
• Highlights prosody's role in efficient communication.

Innovation

• Analyzes prosody-linguistic context redundancy time scale
• Identifies past-future word impact on prosody prediction
• Highlights prosody's role in efficient communication