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Cohn, Neil. "Visual Language Theory and the Scientific Study of Comic." Empirical Comics Research. Digital Multimodal and Cognitive Methods. Eds. Alexander Dunst, Jochen Laubrock and Janina Wildfeuer. Routledge Advances in Comics Studies. London, New York: Routledge, 2018. 305–28. Added by: Okwuchi Mba (12/5/18, 1:22 PM) Last edited by: joachim (4/1/19, 12:50 PM) |
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| Resource type: Book Chapter Language: en: English BibTeX citation key: Cohn2018 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: Cognition, Communications, Language Creators: Cohn, Dunst, Laubrock, Wildfeuer Publisher: Routledge (London, New York) Collection: Empirical Comics Research. Digital Multimodal and Cognitive Methods |
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The past decades have seen the rapid growth of empirical and experimental research on comics and visual narratives. In seeking to understand the cognition of how comics communicate, Visual Language Theory (VLT) argues that the structure of (sequential) images is analogous to that of verbal language, and that these visual languages are structured and processed in similar ways to other linguistic forms. While these visual languages appear prominently in comics of the world, all aspects of graphic and drawn information fall under this broad paradigm, including diverse contexts like emoji, Australian aboriginal sand drawings, instruction manuals, and cave paintings. In addition, VLT’s methods draw from that of the cognitive and language sciences. Specifically, theoretical modeling has been balanced with corpus analysis and psychological experimentation using both behavioral and neurocognitive measures. This paper will provide an overview of the assumptions and basic structures of visual language, grounded in the growing corpus and experimental literature. It will cover the nature of visual lexical items, the narrative grammar of sequential images, and the compositional structure of page layouts. Throughout, VLT emphasizes that these components operate as parallel yet interfacing structures, which manifest in varying ‘visual languages’ of the world that temper a comprehender’s fluency for such structures. Altogether, this review will highlight the effectiveness of VLT as a model for the scientific study of how graphic information communicates.
Added by: joachim |