Dismantling the "Visual Ease Assumption:" A Review of Visual Narrative Processing in Clinical Populations.
Abstract
Visual narratives, such as wordless picture books and picture sequences like comics, have a long history in clinical testing, research, and intervention settings. The widespread "Visual Ease Assumption" rests on the premise that visual narratives, given their non-linguistic nature, may alleviate processing difficulties in populations that struggle with language. In this paper, I review the evidence for and against this Visual Ease Assumption in three clinical populations in which language deficits are common or diagnostic: autism spectrum disorder (ASD), specific language impairment (SLI; now known as Developmental Language Disorder, DLD), and aphasia. I first redefine the Visual Ease Assumption as two testable predictions: (a) that visual narrative processing should be unimpaired for clinical populations compared to neurotypical (NT) populations; and (b) that in clinical populations, visual narrative processing should be less impaired than linguistic narrative processing. Through a review of the limited evidence available to test these predictions in ASD, SLI, and aphasia, I show that the Visual Ease Assumption is largely unsupported in empirical studies. Furthermore, I outline three additional limitations of the Visual Ease A...Continue Reading
References
Citations
Editors' Introduction and Review: Visual Narrative Research: An Emerging Field in Cognitive Science.
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