Language and Culture in Visual Narratives
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Barbara Tversky is Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College and Professor of Psychology Emerita at Stanford University. She is a cognitive scientist whose research has spanned memory, categorization, language, spatial thinking, diagrammatic thinking, event perception, creativity, design, art and gesture. She has enjoyed collaborations with linguists, philosophers, neuroscientists, designers, and artists, as well as computer scientists, engineers, and domain scientists of many varieties.
Tracy Chow received a Master’s degree in Cognitive Studies at Columbia Teachers College and this project served as part of her master’s thesis. Since then, she has applied that knowledge to teaching and curriculum design at the early childhood and elementary school levels.
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Abstract
Languages differ in whether their verbs of motion primarily emphasize manner of motion, for example, skip, scurry, or primarily emphasize path of motion, for example, enter, ascend. This difference affects the ways authors narrate stories and how those stories are translated from path to manner languages and vice versa. When authors who speak manner languages describe complex action paths, they get translated into spatial scenes in path languages and vice versa. We asked whether those differences in describing motion are expressed in visual narratives, in this case, comics directed at teen- and pre-teen boys, comics that are likely to have considerable action. Japanese and Americans rated comic frames on a scale from extreme action to extreme scene-setting taken from the beginning, middle and end of comics from two manner languages, Chinese and English, and two path languages, Japanese and Italian. As predicted, depicted action was rated higher in the manner languages. In addition, action was rated higher for comics in the two eastern languages. Thus, the dominant ways of expressing action in descriptions also appeared in depictions. This effect could be an indirect result of habitual ways of observing the world in anticipation of speaking or it could be a direct result of creating depictions from language.
About the author
Barbara Tversky is Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College and Professor of Psychology Emerita at Stanford University. She is a cognitive scientist whose research has spanned memory, categorization, language, spatial thinking, diagrammatic thinking, event perception, creativity, design, art and gesture. She has enjoyed collaborations with linguists, philosophers, neuroscientists, designers, and artists, as well as computer scientists, engineers, and domain scientists of many varieties.
Tracy Chow received a Master’s degree in Cognitive Studies at Columbia Teachers College and this project served as part of her master’s thesis. Since then, she has applied that knowledge to teaching and curriculum design at the early childhood and elementary school levels.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to Dave Krantz, Jim Corter, and Doris Zahner for statistical advice, to Denis Pelli for discussions, and to Emily Mandlebaum for a pilot study. Portions of this project were supported by NSF CHS-1513841, HHC 0905417, NSF IIS-0725223, NSF IIS-0905417, NSF IIS-0855995, NSF REC 0440103. The Varieties of Understanding Project at Fordham University, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Stanford Regional Visualization and Analysis Center. The opinions, finding, and conclusions or recommendations in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organization.
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© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Language and Culture in Visual Narratives
- Aesthetic perception, attention, and non-genericity: How artists exploit the automatisms of perception to construct meaning in vision
- The metaphoric conceptualization of emotion through heart idioms in Turkish
- The meaning and madness of money: A Semio-ecological analysis
- Debtors, creditors, and sovereign money: A case for institutional blending and the amalgamated mind
- More on money: A response to Oakley
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Language and Culture in Visual Narratives
- Aesthetic perception, attention, and non-genericity: How artists exploit the automatisms of perception to construct meaning in vision
- The metaphoric conceptualization of emotion through heart idioms in Turkish
- The meaning and madness of money: A Semio-ecological analysis
- Debtors, creditors, and sovereign money: A case for institutional blending and the amalgamated mind
- More on money: A response to Oakley
