Cognition· 2026Q1
Syntactic headedness aligns with visual narrative structure
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- 2026year
Short summary
Syntactic headedness in language correlates with the ordering of reversible constructions (POV, refiners) in visual narratives, suggesting language structure influences visual storytelling.
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Key points
- Syntactic headedness of languages correlates with the ordering of reversible constructions (POV, refiners) in visual narratives.
- Analysis of two large comic corpora (TINTIN, VLRC) showed alignment with linguistic data from Grambank, WALS, and Universal Dependencies.
- Behavioral data reanalysis demonstrated that participants' language syntactic structures influenced their preferences for visual narrative construction ordering.
- Findings suggest that syntactic structures in language can influence the sequencing of visual narratives.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Recent research has highlighted how visual narrative sequences involve similar structures and processing as syntax in language, yet no work has asked whether these structures may interact with each other. Here we examine whether the syntactic word orders and/or headedness of languages influence the orders of particular reversible constructions in visual narrative sequencing (POV, refiners). We first compared data from two corpora of annotated comics (TINTIN Corpus: 761 comics, 144 countries, 51 languages; Visual Language Research Corpus: 376 comics, 10 countries, 9 languages) to data about syntactic structure from multiple different language corpora (Grambank, WALS, Universal Dependencies). Across analyses, syntactic headedness of the languages of the comics aligned with ordering of constructions in visual narratives. These differences extended beyond the systematic diversity in visual narrative constructions across comics' styles. Next, reanalysis of behavioral data from Cohn, van Middelaar, et al. (2024) showed that the syntactic structure of participants' langauges affected their preferences for the ordering of visual narrative constructions. Altogether, this combination of corpus and experimental findings suggest that the headedness of syntactic structures in language can permeate the sequencing of visual narratives.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Cognition, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Cultural Studies
Cultural StudiesSocial Sciences