# The time scale of redundancy between prosody and linguistic context

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11630 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11630/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [Revisiting the Uniform Information Density Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11635/) (2021)
- [Context Limitations Make Neural Language Models More Human-Like](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11463/) (2022)
- [A surprisal--duration trade-off across and within the world's languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15000/) (2021)
- [Meaning to Form: Measuring Systematicity as Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05906/) (2019)
- [Predicting Prosodic Prominence from Text with Pre-trained Contextualized Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02262/) (2019)
- [Quantifying the redundancy between prosody and text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17233/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Using Information Theory to Characterize Prosodic Typology: The Case of Tone, Pitch-Accent and Stress-Accent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07659/) (2025)
- [What Do Prosody and Text Convey? Characterizing How Meaningful Information is Distributed Across Multiple Channels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16832/) (2025)
- [Modeling Bottom-up Information Quality during Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17047/) (2025)
- [Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30260/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In spoken communication, information is transmitted not only via words, but also through a rich array of non-verbal signals, including prosody--the non-segmental auditory features of speech. Do these different communication channels carry distinct information? Prior work has shown that the information carried by prosodic features is substantially redundant with that carried by the surrounding words. Here, we systematically examine the time scale of this relationship, studying how it varies with the length of past and future contexts. We find that a word's prosodic features require an extended past context (3-8 words across different features) to be reliably predicted. Given that long-scale contextual information decays in memory, prosody may facilitate communication by adding information that is locally unique. We also find that a word's prosodic features show some redundancy with future words, but only with a short scale of 1-2 words, consistent with reports of incremental short-term planning in language production. Thus, prosody may facilitate communication by helping listeners predict upcoming material. In tandem, our results highlight potentially distinct roles that prosody plays in facilitating integration of words into past contexts and in helping predict upcoming words.