Brief summary of Cohn (2012) Visual Narrative Structure (Cognitive Science)
Neil Cohn’s article Visual Narrative Structure proposes a theory of narrative grammar for understanding how people interpret sequential images, such as comics, cartoons, and other visual storytelling forms. He argues that narrative visuals are not simply a series of pictures, but instead have an underlying structured grammar—much like the syntax that organizes words into sentences.
The article identifies basic narrative categories (similar to stages in a story “arc”) and explains how these categories relate to one another within a canonical narrative structure. Cohn suggests that this structure can be expanded into more complex hierarchical relationships—such as conjunctions, embeddings, and branching patterns—forming a tree-like organization of narrative elements.
He also discusses how narrative “pacing” and movement through a visual story reflect the ways these structural units are combined and embedded. The theory offers diagnostic methods for identifying narrative roles within a sequence and can be applied beyond comics to film, animated narrative, and verbal discourse, providing a broad framework for understanding visual storytelling across media.