Iconic prosody and its connection to iconic gesture

This chapter examines iconic prosody – how speakers modify their voice in ways that are motivated by their meaning. It argues that iconic prosody is deeply connected to iconic gesture, and may occur just as frequently. Section X.1 presents four detailed examples illustrating the formal and semantic breadth of iconic prosody. Section X.2 defines iconic prosody against the backdrop of traditional studies of prosody. Section X.3 discusses pioneering research in the study of iconic prosody, especially Bolinger’s work on emotional expression and Ohala’s work on the size frequency code. Section X.4 reviews recent experiments showing that iconic prosody can be investigated in the psycholinguistics laboratory, including studies demonstrating people’s ability to create iconic vocalizations to communicate various meanings. Section X.5 examines iconic prosody in the wild, where it features in the multimodal context of quotation and ideophones. Finally, section X.6 concludes with some key questions for future research on iconic prosody.