Prosody, Memory Load, and Memory for Speech

Previous experiments indicate that prosody may facilitate memory for spoken utterances. Memory load, however, has not been systematically manipulated and may interact with such facilitating effects. Therefore, subjects were asked to listen to connected prose passages between one to five intonation phrases long and to repeat as much of each narrative as possible. Stimuli were normal productions or else had been deprived of intonational variation, pauses, or both. Performance on both the normal and the prosodically altered passages decreased as passage length grew. Errors were overwhelmingly omissions and occurred mainly in the middle of a passage. The prosodic manipulations affected memory for the longest passages. These results alongside previous findings suggest that prosody facilitates memory for spoken stimuli that are relatively difficult to process. Lengthy material, infrequent words, unrelated items, citation form prosody, or thematic or grammatical anomalies may create such difficulties.