EAN: 9781441181459

THE VISUAL LANGUAGE OF COMICS - NEIL COHN KARTO...

Drawings and sequential images are an integral part of human expression dating back at least as
far as cave paintings  and in contemporary society appear most prominently in comics. Despite
this fundamental part of human identity  little work has explored the comprehension and
cognitive underpinnings of visual narratives-until now. This work presents a provocative
theory: that drawings and sequential images are structured the same as language. Building on
contemporary theories from linguistics and cognitive psychology  it argues that comics are
written in a visual language of sequential images that combines with text. Like spoken and
signed languages  visual narratives use a lexicon of systematic patterns stored in memory 
strategies for combining these patterns into meaningful units  and a hierarchic grammar
governing the combination of sequential images into coherent expressions. Filled with examples
and illustrations  this book details each of these levels of structure  explains how
cross-cultural differences arise in diverse visual languages of the world  and describes what
the newest neuroscience research reveals about the brain's comprehension of visual narratives.
From this emerges the foundation for a new line of research within the linguistic and cognitive
sciences  raising intriguing questions about the connections between language and the diversity
of humans' expressive behaviours in the mind and brain.

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