Speech technology, the automatic processing of (spontaneously) spoken language, is now known to be technically feasible. It will become the major tool for handling the confusion of languages with applications including dictation systems, information retrieval by spoken dialog, and speech-to-speech translation. The book gives a throrough account of prosodic phenomena. The author presents in detail the mathematical and comnputational background of the algorithms and statistical models used and develops algorithms enabling the exploitation of prosodic information on various levels of speech understanding, such as syntax, semantics, dialog, and translation. Then he studies the integration of these algorithms in the speech-to-speech translation system VERBMOBIL and in the dialog system EVAR and analyzes the results.