@inproceedings{min-etal-2026-using,
title = "Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure",
author = "Min, Junghyun and
Warstadt, Alex and
Regev, Tamar I and
Pimentel, Tiago and
Wilcox, Ethan Gotlieb",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1761/",
pages = "40145--40159",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
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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<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.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure
%A Min, Junghyun
%A Warstadt, Alex
%A Regev, Tamar I.
%A Pimentel, Tiago
%A Wilcox, Ethan Gotlieb
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F min-etal-2026-using
%X 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.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1761/
%P 40145-40159
Markdown (Informal)
[Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1761/) (Min et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL
- Junghyun Min, Alex Warstadt, Tamar I Regev, Tiago Pimentel, and Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox. 2026. Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 40145–40159, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.