It's what you say and how you say it

The speech melody of an utterance indicates, among others, if an utterance was intended as a question or a statement and which information the speaker conveys as new or contrastive to the precontext. Research at the MPI for Psycholinguistics shows that listeners are able to use this information efficiently to predict the further course of the utterance or to infer the contrast that was available for the speaker but not explicitly expressed. This ability might be responsible for the efficiency of speech communication.