This literature review examines the role of prosody in the comprehension of spoken language, focusing on three main areas: the recognition of spoken words, the computation of syntactic structure, and the processing of discourse structure. The review highlights progress in understanding how prosodic information influences these processes, moving away from deterministic views of the relationship between prosodic structure and other linguistic aspects. Prosody, an intrinsic determinant of spoken language, affects timing, amplitude, and frequency spectrum. Research shows that coherent prosodic structure facilitates speech recognition, with listeners attending to prosodic continuity over semantic continuity. Studies on word boundary perception and lexical segmentation reveal that prosodic cues, such as strong/weak syllable patterns, play a crucial role in segmenting speech into discrete words. In the recognition of spoken words, prosodic information can activate lexical representations and influence initial activation. While stress differences can affect recognition, they are not always decisive, and vowel quality often takes precedence. Mis-stressing can hinder word recognition, but the impact varies across languages and depends on the context. The review also discusses the role of prosody in syntactic processing and discourse structure, emphasizing the importance of accentuation and deaccentuation in integrating concepts with existing discourse models. Overall, the research highlights the complex and multifaceted nature of how prosody contributes to the comprehension of spoken language.This literature review examines the role of prosody in the comprehension of spoken language, focusing on three main areas: the recognition of spoken words, the computation of syntactic structure, and the processing of discourse structure. The review highlights progress in understanding how prosodic information influences these processes, moving away from deterministic views of the relationship between prosodic structure and other linguistic aspects. Prosody, an intrinsic determinant of spoken language, affects timing, amplitude, and frequency spectrum. Research shows that coherent prosodic structure facilitates speech recognition, with listeners attending to prosodic continuity over semantic continuity. Studies on word boundary perception and lexical segmentation reveal that prosodic cues, such as strong/weak syllable patterns, play a crucial role in segmenting speech into discrete words. In the recognition of spoken words, prosodic information can activate lexical representations and influence initial activation. While stress differences can affect recognition, they are not always decisive, and vowel quality often takes precedence. Mis-stressing can hinder word recognition, but the impact varies across languages and depends on the context. The review also discusses the role of prosody in syntactic processing and discourse structure, emphasizing the importance of accentuation and deaccentuation in integrating concepts with existing discourse models. Overall, the research highlights the complex and multifaceted nature of how prosody contributes to the comprehension of spoken language.