ABSTRACT
We have often had the experience of being able to hear the sound of a television or radio in an adjoining room, muffied and somewhat at a distance, and of being able to tell what kind of event is happening even though we can not hear the actual content of the words. We can immediately identify events like the commentary of a horse race, the reading of the news, a quiz or drama, without being able to identify a single word. That is because these events all sound different. There is a general shape or pattern of sound that we, in our society and culture, associate with these different kinds of events. It is not the sound of consonants and vowels and word-stress; they are used primarily for the identification and recognition of words operating in phrases, clauses, sentences and in text as a whole. The sound that helps us to identify events is a different kind of sound, often referred to as prosodic and paralinguistic.
