在言语中，超段指的是一个以上的音段的语音特性。“超分段”一词也被称为“非分段”，由美国结构主义者在20世纪40年代首创，用于指“超过”元音和辅音的功能。

超段信息适用于几种不同的语言现象（包括音高、持续时间和响度）。超音段通常被认为是言语的“音乐”方面。

如何使用超节段

"The effect of suprasegmentals is easy to illustrate. In talking to a cat, a dog or a baby, you may adopt a particular set of suprasegmentals. Often, when doing this, people adopt a different voice quality, with high pitch register, and protrude their lips and adopt a tongue posture where the tongue body is high and front in the mouth, making the speech sound 'softer.'" "Suprasegmentals are important for marking all kinds of meanings, in particular speakers' attitudes or stances to what they are saying (or the person they are saying it to), and in marking out how one utterance relates to another (e.g. a continuation or a disjunction). Both the forms and functions of suprasegmentals are less tangible than those of consonants and vowels, and they often do not form discrete categories."

（理查德·奥格登，《英语语音学导论》，爱丁堡大学出版社，2009年）

共同的超节段特征

"Vowels and consonants are considered as small segments of the speech, which together form a syllable and make the utterance. Specific features that are superimposed on the utterance of the speech are known as supra-segmental features. Common supra-segmental features are the stress, tone, and duration in the syllable or word for a continuous speech sequence. Sometimes even harmony and nasalization are also included under this category. Supra-segmental or prosodic features are often used in the context of speech to make it more meaningful and effective. Without supra-segmental features superimposed on the segmental features, a continuous speech can also convey meaning but often loses the effectiveness of the message being conveyed."

（Manisha Kulshreshtha等人，“说话人特征分析”，《法医说话人识别：执法与反恐》，艾米·纽斯坦和赫曼特·帕蒂尔·斯普林格主编，2012年）

超节段的种类

"A very obvious suprasegmental is intonation since an intonation pattern by definition extends over a whole utterance or a sizable piece of an utterance. ... Less obvious is stress, but not only is stress a property of a whole syllable but the stress level of a syllable can only be determined by comparing it with neighboring syllables which have greater or lesser degrees of stress." "The American structuralists also treated juncture phenomena as suprasegmental. Differences in juncture are the reason that night rate does not sound like nitrate, or why choose like white shoes, and why the consonants in the middle of pen-knife and lamp-post are the way they are. Since these items contain essentially the same sequences of segments, the junctural differences have to be described in terms of different juncture placement within sequences of segments." "In most of these cases, the phonetic realization of the suprasegmental actually extends over more than one segment, but the key point is that, in all of them, the description of the suprasegmental must involve reference to more than one segment." 

（R.L.特拉斯克，《语言与语言学：关键概念》，第二版，彼得·斯托克威尔编辑，罗特利奇，2007年）

超节段信息

"Suprasegmental information is signaled in speech with variations in duration, pitch, and amplitude (loudness). Information like this helps the hearer segment the signal into words, and can even affect lexical searches directly." "In English, lexical stress serves to distinguish words from each other...for example, compare trusty and trustee. Not surprisingly, English speakers are attentive to stress patterns during lexical access." "Suprasegmental information can be used to identify the location of word boundaries also. In languages like English or Dutch, monosyllabic words are durationally very different than polysyllabic words. For example, the [hæm] in ham has longer duration than it does in hamster. An investigation by Salverda, Dahan, and McQueen (2003) demonstrates that this durational information is actively used by the hearer."

（Eva M.Fernández和Helen Smith Cairns，《心理语言学基础》，Wiley Blackwell，2011）

超节段和韵律

"Although the terms 'suprasegmental' and 'prosodic' to a large extent coincide in their scope and reference, it is nevertheless sometimes useful, and desirable, to distinguish them. To begin with, a simple dichotomy 'segmental' vs. 'suprasegmental' does not do justice to the richness of phonological structure 'above' the segment;...this structure is complex, involving a variety of different dimensions, and prosodic features cannot simply be seen as features which are superimposed on segments. More importantly, a distinction can be made between 'suprasegmental' as a mode of description on the one hand and 'prosodic' as a kind of feature on the other. In other words, we may use the term 'suprasegmental' to refer to a particular formalization in which a phonological feature can be analyzed in this way, whether it is prosodic or not." "The term 'prosodic,' on the other hand, can be applied to certain features of utterances regardless of how they are formalized; prosodic features can, in principle, be analyzed segmentally as well as suprasegmentally. To give a more concrete example, in some theoretical frameworks features such as nasality or voice may be treated suprasegmentally, as having extended beyond the limits of a single segment. In the usage adopted here, however, such features are not prosodic, even though they may be amenable to suprasegmental analysis." 

（安东尼·福克斯，《韵律特征和韵律结构：超分段音韵学》，牛津大学出版社，2000年）