Neil Cohn
| Neil Cohn | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 11, 1980 |
| Fields | Cognitive science, Linguistics, Comics Studies |
| Institutions | Tilburg University |
| Alma mater |
Tufts University of Chicago UC Berkeley |
| Doctoral advisor | Ray Jackendoff, Gina Kuperberg, Phillip Holcomb |
| Other academic advisors | Marta Kutas, Jeff Elman |
| Known for | Visual language theory Contributions to comics theory |
Neil Cohn (/koʊn/; born 1980) is an American cognitive scientist and comic author. His research offers the first serious scientific study of the cognition of understanding comics, and uses an interdisciplinary approach combining aspects of theoretical and corpus linguistics with cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
Cohn’s work argues that common cognitive capacities underlie the processing of various expressive domains, especially verbal and signed languages and what he calls “visual language”—the structure and cognition of drawings and visual narratives, particularly those found in comics. His theories have examined the linguistic status of emoji.
Cohn began developing his theories as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley where he graduated in 2002. He then spent several years as an independent scholar before studying under linguist Ray Jackendoff and psychologists Gina Kuperberg and Phillip Holcomb at Tufts University where he received his PhD in psychology in 2012. He then did a postdoctoral fellowship at UC San Diego working with Marta Kutas and Jeff Elman. In 2016, he joined the faculty of the Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication at Tilburg University. He is the son of Leigh Cohn and Lindsey Hall.
Cohn’s work challenges many of the existing conceptions of both language and drawing. He argues that language involves an interaction between an expressive modality, meaning, and a grammar. Just as sign languages differ from gestures in that they use a vocabulary and grammar, “visual languages” differ from individual drawings because they have a vocabulary of patterned graphic representations and a grammar constraining the coherence of sequential images. Full visual languages primarily appear alongside written languages in comics of the world, though they also appear outside of comics, such as in sand drawings used by Australian Aboriginals. Just as spoken languages differ, so do visual languages: Japanese manga are written in “Japanese Visual Language” while American comics are written in “American Visual Language.” In addition, Cohn has argued that the development of visual languages may follow similar constraints as learning spoken and signed languages, and that most people do not learn how to draw proficiently because they do not acquire visual vocabularies within a critical period.
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