Music and Prosody: Suprasegmental Features of Reggaeton Songs

Abstract

The processing of reggaeton songs demands an active engagement from the listener due to the high level of fragmentation in the lyrics, which stems from the variability in word stress and prosodic segmentation. Changes in word stress challenge the listener’s ability to parse the lyrics and often render the passage semantically and grammatically opaque. Long, deliberate pauses and rhythmic variations within grammatical units can be a hindrance to the perception of certain passages, and hence, to the overall comprehension of the text. However, the prosodic disjointedness is compensated by semantic and grammatical links between the parts of separated structures.