Recent experiments have shown that people iconically modulate their prosody corresponding with the meaning of their utterance (e.g., Shintel et al., 2006). This article reports findings from a story reading task that expands the investigation of iconic prosody to abstract meanings in addition to concrete ones. Participants read stories that contrasted along concrete and abstract semantic dimensions of speed (e.g., a fast drive, slow career progress) and size (e.g., a small grasshopper, an important contract). Participants read fast stories at a faster rate than slow stories, and big stories with a lower pitch than small stories. The effect of speed was distributed across the stories, including portions that were identical across stories, whereas the size effect was localized to sizerelated words. Overall, these findings enrich the documentation of iconicity in spoken language and bear on our understanding of the relationship between gesture and speech.

way-sentences. My claim is that many of the differences between metaphorical and nonmetaphorical patterns including these terms are related to a qualitative difference between real and imagined journeys. Both non-metaphorical and metaphorical instances go back to our experiences with real-world paths, roads and ways. Path and road-sentences are connected with motion along the specific artifacts that these terms refer to. Way-sentences refer to motion through space. Differences between prototypical and un-prototypical paths, roads and ways, however, and a close connection between prototypical instances and metaphorical meaning, result in differences between non-metaphorical and metaphorical patterns. They explain why the source domain verbs in metaphorical path-and road-sentences are more restricted than the verbs in the non-metaphorical sentences. They show why metaphorical ways, but hardly ever metaphorical paths and roads, are paved.

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Embodied motivations for metaphorical meanings.

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