TY  - BOOK
AU  - Cohn,Neil
TI  - Who understands comics?: questioning the universality of visual language comprehension 
SN  - 9781350156043
AV  - PN6714 .C6326 2021
PY  - 2021///
CY  - London, UK, New York, NY
PB  - Bloomsbury Academic
KW  - Comic books, strips, etc
KW  - Semiotics
KW  - Sequence (Linguistics)
KW  - Visual literacy
KW  - Psychological aspects
N1  - "This book is dedicated to my uncle, Ben Hall."; Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-234) and index (pages 235-240); An assumption of universality -- Comprehending visual narratives -- Cross-cultural diversity of visual languages -- Cross-cultural visual narrative comprehension -- Development of visual narrative comprehension -- Variation in fluent comprehenders -- Visual narrative comprehension in neurodiverse and cognitively impaired populations -- Graphic narratives versus filmed narratives -- Visual language fluency
N2  - "Drawings and sequential images are so pervasive in contemporary society that we may take their understanding for granted. But how transparent are they really and how universally are they understood? Combining recent advances from linguistics, cognitive science and clinical psychology, this book argues that visual narratives involve much greater complexity and require a lot more decoding than widely thought. Although increasingly used beyond the sphere of entertainment as materials in humanitarian, educational, and experimental contexts, Neil Cohn demonstrates that their universal comprehension cannot be assumed. Instead, understanding a visual language requires a fluency that is contingent on exposure and practice with a graphic system. Bringing together a rich but scattered literature on how people comprehend, and learn to comprehend, a sequence of images, this book coalesces research from a diverse range of fields into a broader interdisciplinary view of visual narrative to ask: Who Understands Comics?"--
ER  -