We are not talking Supra-calafragilistic-espialadocious here.
What we are talking about here are supra-segmental-phonemes. This is what prosody ultimately develops into; and the ability to understand supra-segmental-phonemes is absolutely necessary if a person is to be an effective native speaker of a language.
We all remember that the phoneme is the smallest unit of a language that can change meaning. "My wife bit me," versus "My wife beat me," illustrates this point. There is a significant change in meaning brought by changing the phoneme "i" to "ea." But prosody, superimposed over a string of words in the sentence can also change the meaning of the sentence in subtle but important ways. We saw above how changing the inflection on the end of a sentence changes it from a question to, perhaps, an exclamation of horror (Please see the graphic version for an illustrated example).