Grammatical Approaches to Written and Graphical Communication

The notion of mental grammar has been at the heart of linguistic theorizing for much of the past century. The arguments for the existence of grammar, a set of mental rules/constraints governing the well-formedness of linguistic structures, are vast and varied, however the central argument that has been made in its favor is that speakers are capable of producing (and understanding) an infinite set of systematically structured words (phonology, morphology) and utterances (syntax). Within the cognitive sciences, the notion of mental grammar has been reserved to describe competence in spoken language, signed language, and on occasion, narrative structure. This symposium explores the possibility that the notion of grammar should be extended to other cognitive domains, specifically the domain of written and graphical communication. Four different domains representing a broad swath of written communication are considered: letter combinations in spelling (orthotactics), sequential images in comics, the internal structure of individual Chinese characters, and the formal structure of calligraphic scripts. Although these domains all integrate elements of spoken language (e.g., phoneme-grapheme mappings, thought bubbles in comics, etc.), this symposium focuses exclusively on those aspects that are distinct from spoken language: abstract orthography-specific spelling knowledge, the system by which narratives are constructed with sequential graphical panels, the internal formal structure of Chinese characters, and the constraints governing the articulation of brushstrokes in a calligraphic manuscript. The papers presented here provide theoretical and experimental evidence that the move to extend the notion of grammar to these domains is substantive and is not simply a metaphor or an analogical borrowing of terminology. These domains are shown to have complex internal structure that is subject to specific constraints on well-formedness. In some cases acceptability judgments and electrophysiological data indicate that speakers have online, synchronic knowledge of these structural constraints. The similarities and differences between the grammars of natural languages and the written/graphical domains presented here will be discussed. Regardless of whether term ‘grammar’ is ultimately applied in these cases, the complexity and systematicity of the cognitive processes underlying these domains must be recognized.