Prosody is the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech, which encodes information that is not encoded by the syntax or words of an utterance. The articles in this issue represent the current state of the art in research on prosody, addressing a number of key questions: What types of information about syntax, semantics, and context is reflected in prosody and intonation? How much of that information can a listener retrieve from the signal? How does this information facilitate language processing in online conversations? How can this information be used to parse corpora, and how can corpora be used to test theories of prosody?