Neil Cohn | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 11, 1980 |
| Alma mater | Tufts University of Chicago UC Berkeley |
| Known for | Visual language theory Contributions to comics theory and emoji theory |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Cognitive science, linguistics, comics studies |
| Institutions | Tilburg University |
| Doctoral advisor | Ray Jackendoff, Gina Kuperberg, Phillip Holcomb |
| Other academic advisors | Marta Kutas, Jeff Elman |
| Doctoral students | Bien Klomberg, Irmak Hacımusaoğlu |
Neil Cohn (/koʊn/; born 1980) is an American cognitive scientist and comics theorist. His research focuses on the cognition of understanding comics, and uses an interdisciplinary approach combining aspects of theoretical and corpus linguistics with cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience.[1][2]
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 2020 book, Who Understands Comics?[3] explored the proficiency required to understand visual narratives, and was nominated for a 2021 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work. His theories on visual language provided the foundation for the creation of automatically generated news comics for the BBC.[4]
Cohn's research has also examined the comprehension and linguistic status of emoji.[5][6][7] He has also helped propose and design several emoji.[8]
- ^ Zimmer, Carl. 2012. The Charlie Brown Effect: A comic book-artist turned-neuroscientist says the images in Peanuts tap the same brain processes as sentences. Discover Magazine. Pp. 68-70
- ^ Robson, David. 2013. How the visual language of comics could have its roots in the ice age. The Guardian. November 23, 2013
- ^ Cohn, Neil. 2020. Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension. London: Bloomsbury.
- ^ Graphical Storytelling Reaching new audiences with short comics about important health stories. BBC News website.
- ^ Cohn, Neil. 2015. Will emoji become a new language? BBC Futures. October 12, 2015
- ^ Gilmore, Garrett. 2015. Help! I can't stop thinking in emoji! VICE. April 21, 2015
- ^ Barrett, Brian. 2016. Facebook messenger finally bridges the great emoji divide Wired Magazine. June 16, 2016
- ^ Kambhampaty, Anna P. 2021. The Melting Face Emoji Has Already Won Us Over. The New York Times. September 29, 2021
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