Age-graded Variation in Japanese Visual Language : The different morphology of adults’ and children’s manga

Previous studies have shown that not only is there something called visual language through which we understand graphical expressions, but also that each culture has its own visual language. Furthermore, there are variances within these visual languages, denoted by genre, which can be interpreted to be dialects. In a similar fashion to a study by Neil Cohn and Sean Ehly in 2016, which uncovered the dialectical differences, this study has utilized 67 graphical schemas, known as visual morphemes, and a corpus of 20 volumes of Japanese comics, to investigate age-grading in the Japanese visual language. The corpus, consisting of 10 volumes aimed towards adults and 10 volumes aimed towards children, was searched for graphical schemas, and their relative frequencies were analyzed with independent samples t-tests. The results show great similarities between the populations, supporting the findings of previous studies indicating that there is a shared visual language between genres. However, there were also great differences in how the visual morphemes were used, with many morphemes being used in statistically different proportions between the populations. Further age-grading was also found in the absolute frequency and the meanings of the morphemes which were used, with children’s visual language appearing to be much more expressive. These results imply that there is significant age-grading in the Japanese visual language and that it can be characterized in several ways, including absolute frequency, content, and proportional use