Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In a corpus of 331 comics, we analyzed the size and frequency of two visual affixes in comics: motion lines (trailing behind movers) with the meaning of directed motion and circumfixing lines (imitating the contours of a mover) with an underspecified meaning of motion. Given that the meaning of circumfixing lines is underspecified compared to motion lines, we asked whether their sizes and frequencies behave in communicatively efficient ways consistent with ambiguous words in language. We hypothesized that circumfixing lines should be smaller and more frequent than motion lines, in line with the ambiguous words being shorter and more frequent than less ambiguous words in spoken language. We found that circumfixing lines are smaller but not more frequent than motion lines. We argue that circumfixing lines are smaller than motion lines because of their underspecification and lower information content and we discuss possible reasons for their lower frequency.