Etymologically, the Greek term prosōidía means ‘stress, quantity, in pronunciation’. We give it a broad sense which includes syllable, stress, pitch, intonation, rhythm, rate of speech, pause, etc. The American tradition uses the term ‘suprasegmental’ to express the idea that the domain of prosody is larger than a single segment and that prosodic phenomena are revealed by a comparison of items in sequence (Lehiste 1970).

The prosodic component of language plays a fundamental role in first language acquisition. Several experimental studies have established tha…