Abstract: This paper reviewed a mount of research using on-line methods on prosody processing in recent years. Firstly, the role of prosody on sentence comprehension was analyzed, including the role of stress, prosodic boundaries, and prosody units on sentence processing. Secondly, the brain mechanisms for the prosody processing were discussed. Although different hypotheses, such as functional hypothesis and acoustic hypothesis, are competing, none of which can account for all the range of experimental data. Finally, it was put forward that the important considerations and issues for future research should focus on the different stage of prosody processing and the relationship of prosody and other cognitive processes.

Key words: on-line method, stress, intonation boundary, prosody unit, sentence comprehension, brain mechanism