New Books in Language

Neil Cohn, "Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Oct 30, 2023

Neil Cohn, author of 'Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension', challenges the assumption of universal comprehension of visual narratives. He explores the complexity of interpreting images, cultural variations, and the developmental trajectory in acquiring the ability to comprehend visual narratives. The podcast also covers topics like the brain's predictions and updates in comics, the influence of disordered focus on comic popularity, methods in visual language comprehension studies, children's development of visual language fluency, and the differences between films and comics in comprehension processes.

01:17:47

Episode guests

Neil Cohn

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

Visual narratives, such as comics, require greater complexity and decoding than widely assumed.

Comics are not a visual language themselves, but written in a visual language, highlighting the complexity of visual narratives.

Early exposure and practice are crucial for developing fluency in understanding and producing visual narratives, similar to learning spoken language.

Deep dives

Understanding the Complexity of Visual Narratives

The book 'Who Understands Comics' by Dr. Neil Cohen explores the complexity of visual narratives and challenges the assumption that their understanding is universally transparent. Dr. Cohen argues that visual narratives, such as comics, involve much greater complexity and decoding than widely thought. The book combines research from linguistics, cognitive science, and clinical psychology to demonstrate that the comprehension of sequential images requires fluency, which is contingent on exposure and practice with a graphic system. The main takeaway is that the understanding of sequential images is more complex than commonly acknowledged and requires competency to decode the images.

Introduction

3min

The Complexity of Understanding Sequential Images

28min

Predictions, updates, and structural components in comics

5min

The Influence of Disordered Focus and Attention on the Popularity of Comics

4min

Methods used in visual language comprehension studies

7min

Development of Visual Language Fluency

12min

Comparing Films and Comics

6min

Upcoming Projects and the Tintin Project

10min

Drawings and sequential images are so pervasive in contemporary society that we may take their understanding for granted. But how transparent are they really, and how universally are they understood? Combining recent advances from linguistics, cognitive science, and clinical psychology, Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension (Bloomsbury, 2020) argues that visual narratives involve greater complexity and require a lot more decoding than widely thought. Although increasingly used beyond the sphere of entertainment as materials in humanitarian, educational, and experimental contexts, Neil Cohn demonstrates that their universal comprehension cannot be assumed. Instead, understanding a visual language requires a fluency that is contingent on exposure and practice with a graphic system. Bringing together a rich but scattered literature on how people comprehend, and learn to comprehend, a sequence of images, this book coalesces research from a diverse range of fields into a broader interdisciplinary view of visual narrative to ask: Who Understands Comics?

In this interview, Dr. Cohn discusses some common misconceptions about comics, the ability to read and make comics, and how drawings are at the core of so many creations.

Who Understands Comics? was Nominated for the 2021 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work

Dr. Niel Cohn is currently an Associate Professor at the Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, Neil Cohn is an American cognitive scientist best known for his pioneering research on the overlap in cognition between graphic communication and language. His books, The Visual Language of Comics (2013) and the 2021 Eisner-nominated Who Understands Comics? (2020), establish a foundation for the scientific study of comics' structure.

Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels.

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New Books in Language

Neil Cohn, "Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Episode guests

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

Deep dives

Understanding the Complexity of Visual Narratives

Visual Language and its Misconceptions

Fluency in Visual Language and its Development

Book: The Patterns of Comics

Multimodal Language Faculty and Graphic Novel

Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts