Actors know a lot about it. Speech artists focus on it all the time. And if you are regularly speaking on the radio, at some point you will have been told to get better at it. But how much do teachers know about prosody?

Even if you’ve never heard of it, prosody forms a vital part of how you and your students communicate. It’s about the stress, intonation and rhythm of how we speak - all of which can provide vital insight and information beyond the literal meaning of the words we say.

“You can think of prosody as the aspect of speech that conveys not just the words a person is saying but how they say them,” explains Duane Watson, Frank W Mayborn chair in cognitive science and a professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. “For example, a person who says, ‘You lied to me,’ as a statement means something very different compared to someone who says, ‘You lied to me?’ as a question - even though the words are the same.”

These key differences in meaning are conveyed in how the speaker produces their words. In English, prosody includes “intonation, rhythm, filled pauses and emphasis in speech, and it can convey information about speaker beliefs, meaning and grammatical structure”, Watson says.

As you might imagine, then, prosody can have a big impact on learning.

“There are definitely effects of prosody on learning and memory,” Watson confirms. “My colleagues and I have found that subtle prosodic choices, such as emphasis, can have an impact on what listeners take away from a conversation.”

Watson and his team have investigated something called ‘contrastive emphasis’, where speakers emphasise a word to contrast it with something else in the conversation.

“It’s the kind of emphasis you might use when saying, ‘Americans drink coffee, not tea,’” he explains.

“We’ve found that this type of emphasis can impact learning. For example, if a listener is learning about protons and electrons in physics, and then hears that ‘protons have a positive charge’, they are more likely to remember that protons have a positive change and electrons don’t - compared with hearing the word ‘protons’ without contrastive emphasis.”

It’s a subtle change in the way speech happens in the classroom, but it is an important one, he says. And he adds that verbal “pauses” can also have an impact.

“We have experimental evidence that filled pauses, like ‘err’ and ‘um’, can influence learning and memory - although not in the way you would expect.”

In one study, Watson and his colleagues played a recording of a chapter from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to a group of people. The researchers had manipulated whether the recording had “errs” and “ums”, coughs or nothing at all in the pauses in speech, and played different versions of the reading to different study participants. The participants then had to do their best to retell the chapter.

“We found that memory for the story was actually better when listeners heard stories with filled pauses [rather than with nothing or with coughs],” Watson says. “It’s not completely clear why filled pauses help memory, but we think they may increase listener attention and engagement.”

So we know that the way we speak can potentially have an impact on the amount of information that pupils take away from our classes. But what about the act of teaching prosody itself to people who are already familiar with a language?

According to Laurence White, senior lecturer in speech and language sciences at Newcastle University, there has been less research into how interventions can change prosody in children than there has for adults.

“In speech and language therapy, there’s a lot of focus on prosody in acquired disorders - so, for instance, if someone has had a stroke or someone’s got Parkinson’s disease, prosody can be severely disrupted,” he says, adding that in such cases, progress in restoring prosody has been successfully made. “From what we know about acquired disorders, we know that we can effectively teach prosody.

“But one of the factors with children may be that you don’t want to discourage them from using their natural speaking voice,” White continues. “You don’t want, in any way - even implicitly - to stigmatise the way a particular child speaks by suggesting that they’re not saying things correctly.”

However, one area where you might want to intervene is in second-language learning - be that non-native English speakers in a UK school, or pupils learning a modern foreign language for the first time.

Annie Tremblay is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Kansas, and an expert on prosody in non-native English speakers. Her own first language is French, meaning that she has had experience of the prosodic difficulties that learners face coming to a new language. “My research focuses on second-language speech perception, and most of it has been conducted on prosody and prosodic aspects of language,” she explains.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the challenges that second-language learners encounter is recognising the different lilts and stresses that are used in different languages.

“French speakers, for instance, can have a lot of trouble producing the right stress when speaking English, because French doesn’t have the same distinctions - that has always been a challenge for me,” she says.

And this can hinder efforts to communicate, Tremblay explains.

“If you don’t [understand stress correctly], things will be more difficult. Either you will miscomprehend speech or your understanding will be slower, because you’ll have difficulty recognising the words. This is why prosody is important to teach in general.”

However, while its importance is clear, Tremblay believes that prosody can often be overlooked in the classroom.

“There are so many aspects of language other than prosody that are also important to teach,” she says. “I’m talking about grammar, words, vocabulary and even just at the level of sounds - consonants, vowels, how to produce certain sounds correctly. So there’s so much to teach that teachers often neglect teaching prosody.

“I don’t think that it’s because prosody is challenging to teach; I think it’s because there’s only so much time in the classroom that you can use to teach. The challenges are not so much teaching prosody per se, but just finding the time to do it.”

Perhaps it’s also overlooked - not just in teaching foreign languages but also in its power to influence learning - because to many speakers prosody is such a natural part of how they communicate every day. Like breathing or walking, it’s automatic.

So how do we begin to appreciate how powerful prosody can be? Well, it’s simple: we just need to give it more emphasis.

Chris Parr is a freelance writer

This article originally appeared in the 20 November 2020 issue under the headline “Tes focus on…Prosody”