Visual Language Lab

Blog

Review: Metaphoricity of Conventionalized Diagetic Images in Comics

Michał Szawerna’s recent book Metaphoricity of Conventionalized Diegetic Images in Comics: A Study in Multimodal Cognitive Linguistics analyzes a variety of structural aspects of the visual languages of comics by taking a deep dive into Peircean semiotics and cognitive linguistics, particularly conceptual metaphor theory, and cognitive grammar. The book seems to have flown largely under…
New paper: The cultural pages of comics

I’m excited to announce that our paper, “The cultural pages of comics: cross-cultural variation in page layouts”, has been published in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics! It actually came out back around a year ago, but I was waiting for it to leave “early view.” Since it’s still unchanged, I figured better to…
New paper: Visual and linguistic narrative comprehension in autism spectrum disorders

My new paper with my collaborator, Emily Coderre, is finally out in Brain and Language. Our paper,”Visual and linguistic narrative comprehension in autism spectrum disorders: Neural evidence for modality-independent impairments,” examines the neurocognition of how meaning is processed in verbal and visual narratives for individuals with autism and neurotypical controls. We designed this study because…
New paper: Visual Language Theory and the scientific study of comics

My latest paper is a chapter in the exciting new book collection, Empirical Comics Research: Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods, edited by Alexander Dunst, Jochen Laubrock, and Janina Wildfeuer. The book is a collection of empirical studies about comics, summarizing many of the works presented at the Empirical Studies of Comics conference at Bremen University in…
New paper: Listening beyond seeing

Our new paper has just been published in Brain and Language, titled “Listening beyond seeing: Event-related potentials to audiovisual processing in visual narrative.” My collaborator Mirella Manfredi carried out this study, which builds on her previous work looking at different types of words (Pow! vs. Hit!) substituted into visual narrative sequences. Here, Mirella showed visual…
New paper: Combinatorial morphology in visual languages

I’m very pleased to announce that my newest paper, “Combinatorial morphology in visual languages” has now been published in a book collection edited by Geert Booij, The Construction of Words: Advances in Construction Morphology. The overall collection looks excellent and is a great resource for work in linguistics on morphology across domains. My own contribution…
Workshop: How We Make and Understand Drawings

A few weeks back I had the pleasure of doing a workshop with Gabriel Greenberg (UCLA) about the understanding of drawings and visual narratives at the University of Connecticut. The workshop was hosted by Harry van der Hulst from the Linguistics Department, and we explored the connections between graphic systems and the structure of language. UConn…
New Paper: In defense of a “grammar” in the visual language of comics

I’m excited to announce that my new paper, “In defense of a ‘grammar’ in the visual language of comics” is now published in the Journal of Pragmatics. This paper provides an overview of my theory of narrative grammar, and rigorously compares it against other approaches to sequential image understanding. Since my proposal that a “narrative…
My friend, Martin Paczynski

It was with much surprise and a heavy heart that I learned last week that my friend and colleague Dr. Martin Paczynski suddenly passed away. Martin and I met in 2006 when I entered graduate school at Tufts University, and he was the first graduate student working with our mentor Gina Kuperberg (I was her…
2017: My publications in review

Last year I summarized all the papers I published in 2016, and I thought it worked out so well I might as well keep it going. This year wasn’t quite the flurry of books and papers as last year (due largely to setting up a new EEG lab and submitting multiple grants), but we had several significant…