Of course the answer is "yes"!

When we listen to speech, we gain more than just the literal meaning of words. Speech conveys additional layers of information through its "musical" qualities: rhythm, speech rate, word duration, pauses, timbre, and intensity. These features, collectively known as prosody, often play a crucial role in syntactic analysis. Prosody can mean the difference between a warm dinner invitation and a terrifying plot twist:

• Let't eat, kids!
• Let's eat kids!

Can you "hear" the difference?

Sometimes, prosodic cues are subtler:

• I didn't watch this movie because I know the director.
  (i.e., it is because I know the director that I decided not to watch the movie)
• I didn't watch this movie because I know the director.
  (i.e., it is not because I know the director that I decided to watch the movie)

In our lab, we study how prosody influences syntax beyond such minimal pairs. Our goal is to quantify the contribution of prosodic cues to syntactic analysis during real-time speech comprehension. To what extent does understanding real-life speech rely on prosody compared to the brain’s dynamic syntactic parsing? How does this reliance differ across languages with varying syntactic flexibility (e.g., Hebrew vs. English)? And how is it affected by the aging process?