I was saddened to learn of Dan Dennett’s passing. He was always encouraging and supportive of my work while I was a grad student at Tufts, and I was glad to make this comic with him about AI and the Chinese Room. The original hung in his office visuallanguagelab.com/chinese-room

Beautiful Neil Cohn, also @neilcohn.bsky cant wait for you to launch the book at MaxPlanck-Psycholinguistics Colloquim in May 🙌🙌🙌

This looks interesting. Will check it out, but it’s on a winner just from the promise/account in the tweet.

Per a quan la traducció al català? Quines ganes de llegir-lo!

The idea that 'language' is amodal and separable from its modalities is the primary, traditional tenet of the language sciences that we argue against in our upcoming book The Multimodal Language Faculty visuallanguagelab.com/mlf

Our TINTIN Corpus now includes 1030 comics from 144 countries/territories spanning over 76K panels. With 650K annotations (and growing!), we've got some really exciting results about the structure of comics coming soon! visuallanguagelab.com/tintin

I'm one of the keynote speakers for this years #AMLaP conference, so submit your abstracts before the deadline and come hang out with me in Edinburgh!

Don't forget to submit your abstract for #AMLaP 2024!

Rob Haisfield (robhaisfield.com) Neil Cohn, also @neilcohn.bsky neil's work builds on Ray Jackendoffs: archive.org/details/founda…

a multimodal cognitive grammar thesis of sorts

Rob Haisfield (robhaisfield.com) they can occupy the same space, as context difference is pretty obvious

related to multimodality: you may be interested in the work of Neil Cohn, also @neilcohn.bsky as it applies to simultaneous image/text parsing

feels like a key ingredient to semantic vision visuallanguagelab.com/research

As ever, I’m sorry to sound like a broken record on this, but I’ll stop sounding like a broken record when comics stop being framed in this way.
*weary sigh*

- When this framing you’re reducing the medium to one function, and in doing so you’re doing a disservice to the readers, creators and potentially missing out on the massive benefits comics can bring

- Reading comics/graphic novels requires readers to know both written & visual languages - they’re incredibly sophisticated readers
- Comics/GNs don’t exist to serve reading prose text. Great if they help enthusiasm for that, but comics aren’t here to serve another medium

- If a child is reading comics/graphic novels, they aren’t a ‘reluctant reader’. They’re a reader.
- Comic/graphic novel readers are often incredibly enthusiastic readers.

As ever:
- There’s no such thing as a ‘reluctant reader’ - there are children who haven’t connected with reading yet, who haven’t been helped to find the right books, they haven’t been helped to find their reading medium yet, or they may just not enjoy reading

*screams into my ‘stop constantly framing comics/graphic novels solely in the terms of being for reluctant readers’ pillow*

Fun thing about the N400, you can get it in response to all kinds of stuff. My favorite is to sound effects that don't match the context sentence:
'Dogs bark' *meow*

My latest paper with Benjamin Weissman showsthat the brain responds similarly when processing predictions that are fulfilled by emoji in sentences as it does for words sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

tetheredtoed Pamela Snow Kathy Rastle James Murphy Holly Lane Matthew Burns Neil Cohn, also @neilcohn.bsky Neil Cohn’s work in his Visual Language Lab is fascinating!

visuallanguagelab.com

For those who may have missed it, my keynote on Multimodality and Visual Language for the LiS Summer School is online (I start at 16:30), which covers my multimodal model of language and lots of new data about comics from around the world youtube.com/watch?v=vpHPWC…