# Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30260 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30260/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07082/) (2020)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [Information-Theoretic Probing for Linguistic Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03061/) (2020)
- [Meaning to Form: Measuring Systematicity as Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05906/) (2019)
- [Causal Estimation of Tokenisation Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03149/) (2025)
- [Quantifying the redundancy between prosody and text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17233/) (2023)
- [The time scale of redundancy between prosody and linguistic context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11630/) (2025)
- [Punctuation Restoration Improves Structure Understanding Without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08382/) (2024)
- [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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.