How to Practice Control of Prosody
Change the meaning just by changing the emphasis.
The Big Idea
Research shows prosody often improves comprehensibility so the listener can understand your meaning more easily. This means emphasizing the important words to make them stand out by using higher pitch and stretching the vowel longer in the stressed syllable. Which words you emphasize can change the meaning.
Practice control by focusing on emphasizing just one word at a time in a short sentence.
Notice how the meaning changes as you emphasize different words.
Which words should I emphasize?
Identifying stress in words is easy—if you don’t know, look it up in the dictionary.
Identifying stress in sentences is different, but not difficult.
There are no definite rules for which words will be stressed in sentences so there’s no place to look for the correct answer.
The good news is there is no correct answer.
Which words you decide to stress (by making the stressed vowel of the stressed word higher in pitch and stretching the vowel longer) depends on your meaning.
However, in general, there are words that are less likely to be stressed. These are “function” words that are important for grammar and add extra information to the content words but don’t carry as much meaning on their own.
Words with low probability of being emphasized (with examples):
Articles & determiners (a, an, the, this, those)
Prepositions & particles (in, on, at, for, to, of, up, out)
Pronouns (I, you, it, we, they)
Auxiliary/helping verbs & modals (be, do, have, can, will, would)
Conjunctions (and, but, or)
Quantifiers (some, any, each)
Words with high probability of being emphasized (with examples):
Although there aren’t many definite rules, there are a few words that will have a higher probability than other words based on their part of speech.
1. Whichever word contains the new information and words that contrast in meaning.
2. Question words (who, what, where, when, why, how, who’s, which)
3. Negative words (can’t, don’t, never, none)
4. Adverbs (really, very, just, always)
5. Adjectives (wonderful, small, blue)
We emphasize the most meaningful words in a sentence.
That’s the answer to the question, “How do I know which words to emphasize?”
Trust yourself.
You know what you want your listener to notice so make it easy for them and impossible to miss by saying those words with higher pitch and stretching the vowel longer in the stressed syllables.
Practice Special Emphasis
Where you place the stress will determine the meaning. The same sentence can be said in many different ways with many different results. This is called “special emphasis.”
In the example below, as the stress moves in a sentence, so does the meaning. What meaning does each sentence have with each different (bold) word emphasized?
Example Sentence: I haven’t seen that movie.
Start by trying to keep a completely flat pitch like a robot, just for practice of control.
Move the emphasis to change the meaning, starting with the first word, “I".
I haven’t seen that movie. Listen
I haven’t seen that movie. Listen
I haven’t seen that movie. Listen
I haven’t seen that movie. Listen
I haven’t seen that movie. Listen
Create Your Own Practice Sentences
You can create your own practice sentences by following the guide for high probability words. You want to reduce the number of low probability words as much as possible, but pronouns are okay to include.
Here are some examples of sentences that don’t include many articles, prepositions, helping verbs, or conjunctions:
I haven’t sent my report yet.
We could move the meeting.
She didn’t ask if you’d help.
They supposedly called me.
You might go again tomorrow.
I thought you already finished.
He told me to wait here.
We need results today.
I only reviewed one section.
This isn’t what I requested.
Notice Changes in Meaning
Every word you stress creates a different meaning for the same sentence. Here are some possibilities when I asked ChatGPT to identify the meaning of each one:
1. I haven’t sent my report yet.
I: Not someone else—I haven’t.
haven’t: Status is incomplete—negation matters.
sent: Not drafted/uploaded—sent is the missing step.
my: It’s my report, not the team’s.
report: The report (not slides/data) isn’t sent.
yet: Timing—expect it later.
Create practice sentences specific to your job or field of work/study.
I used ChatGPT to create sentences that were more specific to a field of work. Here is the prompt I used that you can copy and paste.
Make it more personal in the “INPUTS” section:
Adjust the “Field” line to make it more specific to your job or any topic you want.
Adjust “Terms to use” to list specific words that you want to include.
Adjust “Sets” to choose how many different sentences you want.
“Pronouns for contrast?” - just leave it that way so it will emphasize pronouns.
COPY PROMPT ⇩
You are a prosody drill generator. Make short, domain-specific sentence sets where changing which content word is emphasized changes the meaning.
INPUTS
- Field: [e.g., oncology / SRE / finance]
- Terms to use: [10–20 nouns/verbs/adjectives]
- Sets: [e.g., 8–10]
- Pronouns for contrast? [yes/no]
RULES
- Emphasize only content words. Do NOT emphasize articles, conjunctions, prepositions, or helping/aux verbs. If pronouns=yes, use sparingly for contrast.
- Keep sentences natural to the field, ~6–9 words, specific.
- For each base sentence, list 3–5 emphasis options (content words only) and give a one-line meaning gloss for each (what contrast it signals).
OUTPUT FORMAT (exact)
Base: <sentence>
Emphasis: *word1* / *word2* / *word3* [/ *word4*]
Meanings:
- *word1*: <concise contrast>.
- *word2*: <concise contrast>.
- *word3*: <concise contrast>.
[Repeat for all sets]
My Wish for AI
It would be really helpful for you to hear the example sentences spoken the way they are marked for emphasis. Right now, the worlds of AI text and AI voice are still so far apart. I can have text spoken by AI and have some control over the voice features but there’s not an easy way to control which words are emphasized. I wish I could! That’s my wish for the next step in AI.
Get Feedback
Objective feedback - You can check to see your change in pitch on some of these tools for visualization of changes in pitch.
Subjective feedback - Ask a friend to tell you which word they heard you emphasize the most. Share the numbered sentences with them so they can choose which sentence sounds like the one you were trying to emphasize.
Mix the order of the sentences up when you say them, even do some more than once, so they don’t go in order. Ask your friend to tell you if they heard you emphasize more than one word because the goal is to control your voice to only emphasize the bold word and no other words.
I haven’t seen that movie. Listen
I haven’t seen that movie. Listen
I haven’t seen that movie. Listen
I haven’t seen that movie. Listen
I haven’t seen that movie. Listen
All this information plus a longer prompt and screenshots of the WASP screen that shows the visualization of change in pitch (Hz) is on the PDF in the link below.