Recall of “surface” features of linguistic expressions is significantly
worse than recall of “gist” (i.e., broad semantic content). Existing work
in this domain focuses on memory for specific lexical items or syntactic
constructions (e.g. active/passive); little is known about verbatim or gist
memory for prosodic features, such as stress and pitch accent. We present a
series of recognition memory studies which suggest that prosody can both be
remembered verbatim and impact gist memory. In Experiment 1, participants
were sensitive to changes in application of the Rhythm Rule, a
surface-level phonological alternation, providing evidence that prosodic
representations are stored verbatim in memory, even when they carry no
semantic import. In Experiment 2 and a pilot Experiment 3 on the effect of
answer prosody on recognition of question wording, we find that infelicitous prosody on answers has an inhibitory effect on remembering preceding questions, suggesting that prosody plays a role in memory for gist as well.