Comic reading fluency
August 4, 2015 5:44 pm by
Neil Cohn
At my ComicCon panel, someone asked me whether I have a measure for comic reading experience. Indeed, I do! I’ve been using the Visual Language Fluency Index (VLFI) score which is computed by asking participants to self-rate how often they read various types of comics, draw comics, and their expertise for reading and drawing comics. For those doing research with comics and visual narratives, this measure can be downloaded from my Resources page, along with full documentation and files for computing it.
I’ve used this measure across many studies now, and we often find that aspects of comprehension related to the visual language of comics correlate with participants’ VLFI scores. That is, this appears to be a decent measure of proficiency that can correlate with ratings, reaction times, and even brainwave amplitudes to show differences based on participants’ “fluency” in this structure.
Given this, I got to thinking… I wonder if this data could tell us something interesting about comic readers in general? So, I spent the other day combining together VLFI data from over 23 experiments that we’ve now done on comics over the past 8 years, which amounted to over 1000 participants. Here are some interesting things that came out…
First, VLFI scores also correlate with people’s habits for reading books, watching movies, and watching cartoons. So, more proficient comic readers also consume other types of media in greater quantities (shocking, I know!).
The average age for people to start reading comics was 8.4, with the average age of drawing comics at 9.8. These numbers are a little after when children start being able to comprehend sequential images (roughly 5 years old), so these make sense given the developmental literature.
The VLFI scores correlated with the age of participants, suggesting that people read more comics, and become more proficient at understanding them, as they age. However, an additional correlation suggested that higher VLFI scores occur for people who start reading comics at younger ages. So, proficiency benefits from starting earlier in life. These findings also echo the
developmental literature.
I’m sure there are additional things we can suss out of this data, especially when incorporating the things we actually measured in these experiments. These seem to be some interesting findings to start though.
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