Reading the eye's mind: Words, illustrations, & the shift to literate thinking in German from 1490 to 1700
Abstract
This study tracks changes in three primary characteristics of Early New High German (ENHG) publications from 1499 to 1710: the complexity of the syntactic system of the language, the pictorial saturation of the publications, and the relationship between verbal text and illustrations on the ENHG printed page. Drawing on findings from literary studies, linguistics, cognitive science, and developmental psychology, I predicted that increased literacy and the cognitive changes associated with greater skill in reading during this period of increased literacy among German-speaking people would result in an increase in the syntactic complexity the language, an overall decline in the pictorial saturation of ENHG texts, and increasing independence between words and illustrations on the printed page. In a wide variety of ENHG illustrated publications, I measure syntactic complexity in terms of main-clause and embedded-clause framing, which increased over the period, adjusted for extrapositioning, or violation of the emergent framing rule, which decreased over the period. I measure pictorial complexity in terms of the narrative and symbolic depth of the illustrations in the texts; here, while the complexity of illustrations went up in the middle phase of the period, consistent with predictions based in learning stages of literacy, overall pictorial complexity declined over the period as a whole. I measure verbal-pictorial independence in terms of how much redundancy or overlap between the messages of words and pictures existed within each publication studied. As pictures became less connected with text over the period, as well as less complex, illustrations therefore carried a steadily smaller part of the overall semantic load in these publications. When I combine and interpret all these results in terms of cognitive-sensory modes and associated stages of learning literacy, the data offer a preliminary and observational confirmation of my hypothesis.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
William, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Linguistics|Germanic literature|European history
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