But the combo is unique. Nikki makes an important point that language has become its own evolutionary system adapting to human minds/brains that evolves culturally and generates structure which seems to make it unique

Let us know the answer!!

I think one thing people agree on is that we need to know more about the ingredients and building blocks of language and then compare it to other human behaviours and animal behaviours. Theresa&Nikki stress that many(maybe all)building blocks are shared at least to some degree with different animals

The Poznań #Linguistics Meeting 2025 Grand Debate: "Human #Language: is it unique?" feat. Wolfgang Dressler, Magdalena Wrembel, Raymond Hickey, Nikki Ritt, @thematzing.bsky.social and @neilcohn.bsky.social

That is, while I do not think it was made the way it is (prompted?) with intent, I see a usefulness to its “wrongness”

This image confuses in a way so pleasantly (to me) that I wish it was not accidental slop.

If you look at the thumb of the hand holding the duck and compare the length of the girl's arms, it gets even weirder. 🤯

Another reminder that graphics are decomposible… I assume this was created by AI because the top implies the girl walks forward but the legs and feet suggest waking away. Each part is well-formed but the whole is odd

I've found the work and posts of @neilcohn.bsky.social super interesting to follow on this front: researching how comics encode and how readers construct meaning.

Great plenary by @neilcohn.bsky.social at the 2025 Poznań #Linguistics Meeting: "Reimagining linguistic uniqueness in a multimodal paradigm"

I’ve heard people doubt that graphics can be broken down into “minimal units” but here’s Hokusai clearly showing how to build pictures out of basic parts from over 200 years ago (from the Hokusai Manga exhibit at the Creative Museum in Tokyo)

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

cool study, visual depiction of motion in 300 comics across the world by @cogirmak.bsky.social @neilcohn.bsky.social Might be of interest to @dialhforhagai.bsky.social @soengery.bsky.social @hannahtempler.com @kochalka.bsky.social @tomtomorrow.bsky.social etc (or not 😬, if not sry)

Thanks a lot! 😊

Fascinating stuff!!

With different cues, it’s possible to explicitly indicate direction, convey varying levels of speed (especially with more lines) and even depict multiple moments. I love this work, even though it pushed back my defense time. Curiosity matters more to me 🥹

Images don’t necessarily show a single frozen moment. Look how they can depict multiple moments at once:

I was mesmerized by the idea that something static can convey not only motion but also temporality, and I decided to test it empirically. It wasn’t an easy task, as the way our data was organized didn’t make it straightforward. But now, here is our paper! ♥️ www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

Interesting work, but man what a missed opportunity to make use of the (for once totally justified) xkdc ggplot theme here :D

How come i didn't think of it :D

New paper alert! Work by @cogirmak.bsky.social explores the motion events in 300+ comics from around the world, revealing subtle underlying features of different types of motion cues: "Whoosh! visual depictions of direction, speed, and temporality" www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

"We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically." www.ru.nl/en/research/...

I haven’t checked the specifics of @neilcohn.bsky.social‘s work on this now, but it looks like the pattern is also that role (agent/patient) outranks left vs right presentation. In any case, I’d expect the animacy configuration to play a larger role anyway (i.e. if P is more animate than A).

Here's a nice new paper yet again showing the benefits of drawing for better comprehension and understanding (which is not surprising from a multimodal language view): "Benefits from sketching for improving comprehension monitoring from illustrated texts" link.springer.com/article/10.3...

@neilcohn.bsky.social this is fun stuff!

Ooh cant wait for this!

I’m super excited for you. What a creative and meaningful accomplishment. With how bad the world is now, this is a bright ray of sunshine.

yoooo!!!

Looking forward to this!

I got the proofs today for my upcoming graphic novel about language, cognition, and visual communication and I cannot contain myself with how excited I am for this book to finally come out after working on it for 7 years 😱 visuallanguagelab.com/sip

Very excited for this one! May have to share copies with my Communication colleagues at my college

Well, you all know I NEED to get this!

Definitely worthy of excitement and celebration! Congrats.

I got the proofs today for my upcoming graphic novel about language, cognition, and visual communication and I cannot contain myself with how excited I am for this book to finally come out after working on it for 7 years 😱 visuallanguagelab.com/sip

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

My publisher @bloomsburyling.bsky.social is currently having a back-to-school sale, so all my books are now 30% off, including my most recent ones! Patterns of Comics: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/patterns-... Multimodal Language Faculty: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/multimoda...

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

Language is not a monolith, but a set of connected cognitive capacities: what architecture explains best language structure, processing, evolution etc.? Our intro to ‘Parallelism in the architecture of language’, w/ @neilcohn.bsky.social & Eva Wittenberg is out! 🧠🗣️ doi.org/10.1111/tops...

I also agree PhD level experts are useful, so could we...fund them...and educate more of them...and listen to them when making important decisions?

Uncritical adoption of AI “undermines our basic pedagogical values and principles of scientific integrity. It prevents us from maintaining our standards of independence & transparency. And most concerning, AI use … hinder[s] learning and deskill critical thought.” openletter.earth/open-letter-...

Hello & HAPPY FRIDAY, as promised an open letter by my lovely colleagues and myself. Everybody, feel free to sign this even if you are not NL-based and ‼️ share ‼️ (anonymous signature is poss): Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia openletter.earth/open-letter-...

In a new paper with @giosuebaggio.bsky.social and Eva Wittenberg, we introduce our special issue of Topics in Cognitive Science about "Parallelism in the Architecture of Language" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Today is our last day of funding for the TINTIN Project about the structure of global comics, which has been an amazing journey. Tomorrow we start the PICTREE Project, back to studying the neurocognition of comics! TINTIN: www.visuallanguagelab.com/tintin PICTREE: www.visuallanguagelab.com/pictree

Natively is a bit of an exaggeration, as it's mostly just other modalities mapped to text space as input - but this makes their 'understanding' rather shallow

*all semantic information* is quite the claim; in our experiments they miss a lot of semantics from visual 'text space' in that after the image encoder the visual information is fixed, and mixed with text tokens for seq2text - which is not how multimodality works..

This is a terrible take, starting with the assumption that models based on *text* accurately reflect Language, snd that Language itself is an amodal, arbitrary, symbolic system, which it’s not. Language is inherently multimodal and polysemiotic, and text is not natural language production

All the constructs we analyzed in the corpus are compiled into our annotation guides with 18 chapters of different structural classes. We made a limited run of print editions, but the whole document is available for free as a pdf on the website for the project! www.visuallanguagelab.com/tintin

Our primary stages of the TINTIN Project are now winding down, with our resulting TINTIN Corpus now consisting of 1,030 comics from 144 countries with over 76K panels and over a million annotations across numerous structures of the visual languages of comics visuallanguagelab.com/tintin

SO COOL

This new paper uses eye-tracking to show that Japanese and American readers’ eye-movements vary when reading US comics and manga due to both differences in cross-cultural attention and familiarity with their different comics onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...