Our understanding of language has long centered on speech, but when we take seriously the multimodal nature of human expression, a different picture emerges.
What do people really mean when they say, ""I can't draw?" Research by Dr. Neil Cohn suggests it’s not about talent but the absence of an acquired "visual vocabulary."
In this episode of Many Minds Podcast, Cohn shares a fresh perspective on the human capacity for language.
In contrast to the traditional view that language is primarily tied to speech, Cohn proposes, instead, "a multimodal language faculty."
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"If you’ve taken Linguistics 101, you know what language is. It’s a system for conveying meaning through speech. We build words out of sounds, and then complex ideas out of those words. Remarkably, the relationship between the sounds and the meanings they convey is purely arbitrary. Human language consists, in other words, of abstract symbols. Now, of course, there are also sign languages, but these operate in the same way, just in a different medium. This, anyway, is the view of language that has dominated and defined linguistics for many decades. But some think it gets some pretty fundamental things pretty wrong. Some think we need a new picture of language altogether.
My guest today is Dr. Neil Cohn. Neil is Associate Professor at the Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication, in the Netherlands; he is also the director of the Visual Language Lab at Tilburg. For about two decades, Neil has been studying the rich properties of graphic systems — especially comics — and has built an argument that some constitute full-blown languages. His latest book, co-authored with, Joost Schilperoord, is titled A Multimodal Language Faculty. It challenges that longstanding, deeply held view of what language is. Instead, the book argues that the human language capacity combines three different modalities — the vocal modality (as in speech), the bodily modality (as in gesture), and the graphic modality (as in comics and other visual narratives). And each of these modalities is naturally able to support full-blown languages.
Here, Neil and I talk about the basic assumptions of modern linguistics and where those assumptions come from. We discuss the idea that there are three expressive modalities that come naturally to humans, with each modality optimized for certain kinds of meaning. We talk about Neil’s career, not only as an academic, but as an illustrator. We discuss cross-cultural differences and similarities in comics, and how comics have changed over the last century. And, finally, we consider how Neil’s framework challenges current theorizing about the evolution of language. Along the way, Neil and I touch on sign languages and homesign systems, visual style vs visual language, Peircean semiotics, animal tracks, cave art, emoji, upfixes, sand drawing, Manga, the refrain 'I can’t draw,' and the idea that the graphic modality is the only one that’s truly unique to our species."
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Templeton World Charity Foundation's Diverse Intelligences is a multiyear, global effort to understand a world alive with brilliance in many forms. Its mission is to promote open-minded, forward-looking inquiry in animal, human, and machine intelligences. We collaborate with leading experts and emerging scholars from around the globe, developing high-caliber projects that advance our comprehension of the constellation of intelligences.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI), made possible through a grant from TWCF to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The Many Minds podcast is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte. Creative support is provided by DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Artwork featured as the podcast badge is by Ben Oldroyd. Transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
