Speaking in Pictures Teaching Resources

Speaking in Pictures Teaching Resources

Speaking in Pictures is a widely accessible introduction to language and linguistics, visual communication, and cognitive science, plus the building blocks of how drawing and comics are structured and comprehended. Because of this, it is ideal for being used as a primary or supplementary text for classes in linguistics, comics studies, and visual communication. It is most suited as a primary text for an introductory class on Visual Language, like what I’ve taught for over 15 years.

Below you’ll find an example course syllabus for an introductory Visual Language class using Speaking in Pictures (SiP) as a primary text, along with recommendations for supplementary readings.

Beneath this you’ll find suggestions for homework assignments. which can be use for any classes that use Speaking with Pictures as a textbook, no matter the syllabus.

Speaking in Pictures by Neil Cohn

Visual Language class syllabus

1. Introduction

  • SiP Chapter 1

2. Graphology

  • SiP Chapter 2

3. Meaning

  • SiP Chapter 3
  • Kutas, Marta, and Kara D. Federmeier. 2011. Thirty years and counting: Finding meaning in the N400 component of the Event-Related Brain Potential (ERP). Annual Review of Psychology 62 (1):621-647. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.131123.

4. Writing systems

5. Lexicon 1: open-class morphology
Reading: SiP Chapter 5

6. Language Development

7. Lexicon 2: closed-class morphology

8. Mental spaces: metonymy, metaphor, blending

  • SiP Chapter 8
  • Forceville, Charles. 2016. Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Blending Theory, and other Cognitivist Perspectives on Comics. In The Visual Narrative Reader, edited by Neil Cohn, 89-114. London: Bloomsbury.
  • Arts, Anja, and Joost Schilperoord. 2016. Visual Optimal Innovation. In Multimodality and Performance, edited by Carla Fernandes, 61-81. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

9. Grammar 1: Complexity Hierarchy

  • SiP Chapter 9 (pp.221-235)
  • Jackendoff, Ray, and Eva Wittenberg. 2014. “What You Can Say Without Syntax: A Hierarchy of Grammatical Complexity.” In Measuring Linguistic Complexity, edited by Frederick Newmeyer and L. Preston, 65-82. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

10. Grammar 2: basic narrative categories and schema

11. Grammar 3: Narrative modifiers

12. Layout

13. Processing of visual language

14. Diversity and universals across visual languages

15. Multimodal interfaces

16 Multimodal structure and meaning-making

Homework recommendations

For homeworks (and exams), I typically prefer assignments that use both analysis and production.

  1. “Analysis” questions provide students with examples to analyze, typically by diagramming “tree structures” for the example constructs (graphology, morphology, grammar, etc.). Assignments usually have a few analysis questions for the construct of that topic, and my exams often provide just a few examples where students need to analyze them for all the constructs they have learned (Ex: here’s a comic strip, diagram its morphology, grammar, mental spaces, etc.). Analysis examples are pretty straightforward, so I won’t detail them here.
  2. “Production” questions give students a construct or a tree structure and ask them to create their own examples (usually by drawing them, like “here’s a tree diagram, draw a sequence that uses this structure”). Production assignments are particularly helpful because each student needs to make something unique, answers cannot be looked up online (or generated with AI), and producing examples requires students to fully understand the constructs.

Here’s some example prompts for questions for different structures, mostly production questions…

Introductory (Chapter 1): Provide students with multiple comic versions of the same story and then ask them to detail as many things as possible that are 1) consistent between the versions and 2) different between the versions. If you do a search for “Project ArtCred” you’ll find lots of good examples (such as here). This is a good first assignment before you start teaching basic constructs, since it gets students to think about their intuitions for what’s happening in the comics before they have learned the theoretical machinery.

Lexicon (Chapter 5): Ask students to create an inventory of the parts of various faces (ex. 5 types of eyes, noses, mouths, ears, head shapes, etc) and then to use their inventory to recombine the parts to create all different possible generated faces using these elements. This could also be extended beyond faces.

Lexicon (Chapter 5): Have students work as a group. Given them prompts for various things to draw (tree, flower, mountain, etc.) within 15 seconds. Have them turn in all drawings from their group together, along with an analysis comparing what they drew: What was consistent? What was different? Where do they think those consistencies and differences came from?

Morphology (Chapter 7): Ask students to create new bound morphemes using each of the main morphological strategies: affixation, suppletion, reduplication, morphological blending. By “new” they can’t be existing visual morphemes. Have them detail the meaning of the morphemes and their constraints (ex: “they have to go above the stem, not next to it”)

Metaphor/blending (Chapter 8): Give students established metaphoric frames (ex. LIFE/CAREER IS A JOURNEY, ANGER IS HOT FLUID IN A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER) and have them draw a novel example that invokes it and diagram the interactions it uses between mental spaces.

Simple grammars (Chapter 9): Ask students to find examples from their daily lives of various examples of “simple” grammars (one-unit, two-unit, linear ordered, linear unordered, simple phrase)

Narrative (Chapter 9): Provide students with narrative tree structures and have them draw sequence that obey those structures. One variant I like is to have part of a narrative sequence be stable, and have them draw variants for a particular structure (such as have just one part that requires different conjunctions, but with the rest of the sequence unchanged). A variation is to do this with the inferential panels, so have one sequence where students need to use different inferential panel techniques to replace the Peak events.

Layout (Chapter 10): Similar to above, provide tree structures for various layouts and ask students to then draw those layouts.