Mark the Unexpected! Animacy Preference and Directed Movement in Visual Language.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Linguistics
• Visual Communication

Background:

• A common animacy preference exists in human perception and language.
• This preference influences how grammatical features, like animacy, are marked in spoken languages.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if animacy preference affects the visual morphological marking of motion in comics.
• To determine if comics use pictorial cues differently for animate versus inanimate entities to signal motion.

Main Methods:

• A corpus study analyzed 331 comics from 81 countries.
• Examined the use of motion lines (directional) and circumfixing lines (non-directional) to indicate motion.
• Compared the marking of animate and inanimate entities.

Main Results:

• Inanimate entities were more marked by directional motion lines than animate entities.
• No significant difference in marking was found for non-directional circumfixing lines between animates and inanimates.
• Results were consistent across different global regions and comic styles.

Conclusions:

• Visual morphology in comics follows the "mark the unexpected" principle, similar to spoken languages.
• Inanimate objects require more explicit marking for directed motion due to lower expectation (higher surprisal).
• This principle may be a cognitive universal, applicable across different communication modalities.