Neil Cohn

Electrophysiological correlates of complement coercion

This study examined the electrophysiological correlates of complement coercion. ERPs were measured as participants read and made acceptability judgments about plausible coerced sentences, plausible noncoerced sentences, and highly implausible animacy-violated sentences (“The journalist began/wrote/astonished the article before his coffee break”). Relative to noncoerced complement nouns, the coerced nouns evoked an N400 effect. This effect was not modulated by the number of possible activities implied by the coerced nouns (e.g., began reading the article; began writing the article) and did not differ either in magnitude or scalp distribution from the N400 effect evoked by the animacy-violated complement nouns. We suggest that the N400 modulation to both coerced and animacy-violated complement nouns reflected different types of mismatches between the semantic restrictions of the verb and the semantic properties of the incoming complement noun. This is consistent with models holding that a verbs semantic argument structure is represented and stored at a distinct level from its syntactic argument structure. Unlike the coerced complement noun, the animacy-violated nouns also evoked a robust P600 effect, which may have been triggered by the judgments of the highly implausible (syntactically determined) meanings of the animacy-violated propositions. No additional ERP effects were seen in the coerced sentences until the sentence-final word that, relative to sentence-final words in the noncoerced sentences, evoked a sustained anteriorly distributed positivity. We suggest that this effect reflected delayed attempts to retrieve the specific event(s) implied by coerced complement nouns.

Framing Attention in Japanese and American Comics: Cross-Cultural Differences in Attentional Structure

Research on visual attention has shown that Americans tend to focus more on focal objects of a scene while Asians attend to the surrounding environment. The panels of comic books – the narrative frames in sequential images – highlight aspects of a scene comparably to how attention becomes focused on parts of a spatial array. Thus, we compared panels from American and Japanese comics to explore cross-cultural cognition beyond behavioral experimentation by looking at the expressive mediums produced by individuals from these cultures. This study compared the panels of two genres of American comics (Independent and Mainstream comics) with mainstream Japanese “manga” to examine how different cultures and genres direct attention through the framing of figures and scenes in comic panels. Both genres of American comics focused on whole scenes as much as individual characters, while Japanese manga individuated characters and parts of scenes. We argue that this framing of space from American and Japanese comic books simulate a viewer’s integration of a visual scene, and is consistent with the research showing cross-cultural differences in the direction of attention.

Comics, Linguistics, and Visual Language: The Past and Future of a Field

Many authors of comics have metaphorically compared their writing process to that of language. Jack ‘King’ Kirby, one of the most influential artists of mainstream American comics, once commented, ‘I’ve been writing all along and I’ve been doing it in pictures’ (Kirby 1999). Similarly, Japan’s ‘God of Comics’ Osamu Tezuka stated, ‘I don’t consider them pictures … In reality I’m not drawing. I’m writing a story with a unique type of symbol’ (Schodt 1983). Recently, in his introduction to McSweeny’s (Issue 13), comic artist Chris Ware stated that ‘Comics are not a genre, but a developing language.’ Furthermore, several comic authors writing about their medium have described the properties of comics like a language. Will Eisner (1985) compared gestures and graphic symbols to a visual vocabulary, a sentiment echoed by Scott McCloud (1993), who also described the properties governing the sequence of panels as its ‘grammar.’ Meanwhile, Mort Walker (1980), the artist of Beetle Bailey, has catalogued the graphic emblems and symbols used in comics in his facetious dictionary, The Lexicon of Comicana. Truly, there seems to be an intuitive link between comics and language in the minds of their creators, a belief shared by several researchers of language who discuss properties of comics in a linguistic light. Exploring these works can provide insight into the extent to which this comparison might hold, its limitations, and how it can guide future research.