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Join us for the

Visual Language Conference 2024 (VisLang2024)

27-28 June 2024

Registration open soon


New lab members!

This Fall we welcome our visiting PhD student Maki Miyamoto to work on onomatopoeia in our TINTIN Project!

Upcoming Events

March 11 2024. Keynote talk: Multimodality and Visual Language. Linguistics Summer School Federal University of Juiz de Fora. Juiz de Fora, Brazil

March 11-14 2024. Course: Multimodality. Linguistics Summer School Federal University of Juiz de Fora. Juiz de Fora, Brazil

June 9 2024. Talk at the Picture Worlds Exhibition. Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California

September 5-7 2024. Keynote talk. AmLAP Conference. Edinburgh, Scotland

Organizations to support

Hero Initiative

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

Reading with Pictures

Latest Blog Post

  • 2022: My publications in review

    I’m a little late to post it, but in keeping with my annual tradition, here’s a rundown of all the papers I published in 2022. There were a lot of […]


Recent papers

Hacımusaoğlu, Irmak and Neil Cohn. The meaning of motion lines?: A review of theoretical and empirical research on static depiction of motionCognitive Science. 47 (11):e13377

Atilla, Fred, Bien Klomberg, Bruno Cardoso, Neil Cohn. 2023. Background Check: Cross-Cultural Differences in the Spatial Context of Comic ScenesMultimodal Communication.

Tavares, Rui, Mireia Alemany-Pagès, Sara Araújo, Neil Cohn, João Ramalho-Santos, Anabela Marisa Azul. 2023. Comics in Science and Health Communication: Insights from Mutual Collaboration and Framing a Research PracticeInternational Journal of Qualitative Methods. 22.

Cohn, Neil and Joost Schilperoord. 2023. Visual languages and the problems with ideographies: A commentary on MorinBrain and Behavioral Sciences. 46: e240

Klomberg, Bien, Irmak Hacımusaoğlu, Lenneke Lichtenberg, Joost Schilperoord, and Neil Cohn. 2023. Continuity, Co-reference, and Inference in Visual SequencingGlossa: a journal of general linguistics 8(1).

Coderre, Emily L. and Neil Cohn. 2023. Individual differences in the neural dynamics of visual narrative comprehensionPsychonomic Bulletin and Review.

Books on Visual Language

The Patterns of Comics
Released December 2023!

Who Understands Comics? Book
2021 Eisner Award Nominee
The Visual Narrative Reader
The Visual Language of Comics