Psycholinguistics is definitely tied up to prosody

Abstract

For almost two decades, phonologists, phoneticians and psycholinguists have devoted attention to the value of prosodic information during silent reading. Until then information on the influence of syntactic and semantic aspects in silent reading was the focus of attention in Psycholinguistics. Despite the joint efforts of researchers, there are many issues to be explored regarding two main domains. The first relates to individual prosodic parameters to languages that can have influence on the processing of sentences. The second refers to how the parser uses the prosodic information present in written stimulus on the understanding of silently reading. In both situations, it will be necessary to focus on methodological aspects in addition to theoretical ones. If on the one hand we already have strong evidence about the influence of prosody in silent reading, on the other hand it cannot be denied that measuring the prosody mentally organized by the reader during reading process is not an easy task. Thus, this article intends to emphasize the complexity concerning the theme and at the same time the needs for further investigation in each language alone. It presents some insights from the early researches in Portuguese language and offers some suggestions for future investigation.