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Accessible explanations.
Plain-language introductions to the parts of prosody — what each one is, why it matters for reading, and how to see it at work in the tools on this site.
Prosody
The sound structure of language: several distinct things, often discussed as one.
The five components
Each page sets out what the component is and what the research does and does not show. Where a tool exists, the page ends with somewhere to try the phenomenon on your own text.
Stress
Why one syllable of a word carries the strongest beat, how little ordinary print marks it, and what two experiments found when stress was marked explicitly.
Rhythm
How beats distribute across a phrase, the four shapes English keeps returning to, and why rhythm is relative prominence rather than even timing.
Phrasing
Which words group together: why one comma can change a sentence, and how the inner voice marks boundaries that print leaves out.
Emphasis and focus
Which word carries the news: why the same sentence emphasizes different words depending on what the reader already knows, and what silent readers do with capitals.
Intonation
How pitch rises and falls across a phrase, why print marks the end of a sentence rather than the shape of the voice, and what the research does and does not establish.
Implicit prosody
Implicit prosody is not a sixth component. It is the claim that readers construct all five while reading silently, with none of it printed on the page — that silent reading has a sound structure of its own, which is what the tools on this site try to make visible.
The page covers what it means to say readers project prosody onto text, how researchers study something no one can hear, and what the evidence does and does not establish.
Behind the tools
Where this came from
This site grew directly out of the research. Gross, Winegard, and Plotkowski (2018) concluded their study of stress marking in print by asking whether a free application could transform ordinary text into typographically enhanced text. They posed the question using the same stress-marking convention they had studied:
As printed in the 2018 article, with capitals marking the stressed syllables: Can YOU iMAGine an APP that HELPS you HEAR the RHYTHm of TEXT?
As printed in the 2018 article. Unmarked, it reads: Can you imagine an app that helps you hear the rhythm of text? The capitals fall on stressed syllables, as in the article’s title — Marking stress exPLICitly — and as the tools on this site mark them.
Prosody Trainer is one answer to that question.
Gross, J., Winegard, B., & Plotkowski, A. R. (2018). Marking stress exPLICitly in written English fosters rhythm in the reader’s inner voice. Reading Research Quarterly, 53(3), 305–321. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.198 · Open access
The Stress page explains what that study found — and what it did not.