Visual Semiotics 441
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Visual Semiotics
M Danesi, Victoria College, University of Toronto,
Toronto, Canada
ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The study of visual signs and their representational
functions became a major branch of semiotics after
the publication of two influential books: Rudolf
Arnheim’s Visual thinking (1969) and Jonathan
Berger’s Ways of seeing (1972). Visual signs are de-
fined, simply, as signs that are constructed with a vis-
ual signifier (form), i.e., with a signifier that can be
seen, rather than heard, touched, tasted, or smelled.
Visual semiotics is a growing and robust area of
inquiry, which includes the study of art forms, logos
in advertising, maps, diagrams, pictographs, alphabet
characters, and other visual artifacts and symbols.
Among the relevant works in this field are those by
Barthes (1977), Sonesson (1987, 1994), Saint-Martin
(1991), and Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok (1994).
A convenient classificatory framework of visual
signs can be found in Santaella-Braga (1988).
Mental Imagery
The semiotic study of visual signs overlaps consider-
ably with the study of mental imagery within psychol-
ogy. An image is defined simply as a mental picture of
objects, events, feelings, actions, situations, and ideas
(real or otherwise). Images allow us to recall events,
refer to them in various ways, and to generate hypo-
thetical scenarios of situations or conditions that we
may not even have actually experienced. Mental
images are substitutes for real things, allowing people
to recall, plan for, and predict things (Kosslyn, 1983,
1994). But these are not monolithic. Individuals differ
widely in their abilities to construct images and use
different aspects of imagery. For example, some peo-
ple are better than others at moving objects around in
their heads. They can visualize, say, the letter N chan-
ging into a Z when rotated to a certain point. Others
Quine W V O (1953). From a logical point of view.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Russell B (1903). The principles of mathematics. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Russell B (1905). ‘On denoting.’ Mind 14, 479–493.
have great difficulty in carrying out such imaginary
rotations. People imagine faces and voices, locate
imaginary places, scan game boards (like a checker
board) in their minds, arrange furniture in a room,
design a blueprint, and so on in similar, but signifi-
cantly differentiated ways (Kosslyn, 1983, 1994).
Psychological studies have shown that images also
vary along cultural lines. When asked to visualize a
triangle or a cat, people living in the same culture will
come up with very similar mental pictures of the two
referents. These isomorphic images are known as
‘cultural prototypes’ (for the concept of ‘prototype’
in psychology, see Rosch, 1973, 1975, 1981, Rosch
and Mervis, 1975, Taylor, 1995). The triangle that
people living in Western culture typically imagine is
an equilateral one, because it is the type of triangle
that is perceived as the prototypical or basic form.
It is the one that is perceived to be exemplary or
representative of all triangles. Obtuse-angled, right-
angled, and acute-angled triangles are perceived to be
subtypes of the equilateral triangle. Similarly, the
image of the cat that comes to the mind of subjects
living in Western culture is that of a household cat,
because it is the most typical in that culture.
Images are not generated only by visual perception.
They can be elicited through other sensory and affec-
tive modalities. These modalities can be easily experi-
enced by imagining such things as: (1) the sound of
thunder, (2) the feel of wet grass, (3) the smell of fish,
(4) the taste of toothpaste, (5) the sensation of being
uncomfortably cold, (6) the sensation of extreme
happiness. The image that comes to mind in the case
of (1) has an auditory quality to it, (2) a tactile one,
(3) an olfactory one, (4) a gustatory one, (5) a bodily
one, (6) an emotional one. Moreover, images are not
elicited solely by sensory modalities; they can be ab-
stract, fictitious, or narrative. As an example of an
abstract image, think of love. The image that this
concept evokes is tied to some personal experience,
such as the expression of a face in love. A fictitious
image is something that can be made up in the imagi-
nation. An example of a fictitious image is a ‘winged
442 Visual Semiotics
table.’ Although no such thing exists in real life, we
nonetheless have no problem imagining it. Finally, a
narrative image is one that unfolds like a story. For
example, we recall encounters with people in narra-
tive ways, with different images representing different
episodes of the encounter in a storylike fashion.
Image Schemas
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), one of the mod-
ern-day founders of semiotics, used the word image in
two senses in his theory of the sign (Saussure, 1916:
16). He defined a signifier (such as a word) as a
‘sound image’ and its signified (meaning) as the ‘con-
ceptual image’ that the word calls to mind. Recent
work on the conceptual imagery associated with ver-
bal forms has shown that Saussurean images are
‘schematic’ (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff
and Johnson, 1980, 1999). This has led to the devel-
opment of image schema theory within linguistics (see
Cognitive Linguistics). Image schemas are defined as
unconscious mental outlines of recurrent shapes,
actions, dimensions, orientations, objects, etc. Al-
though they are unconscious, their ‘reality’ can be
easily ascertained by prompting subjects in specific
ways. For example, if someone were asked to explain
the expression ‘I’m feeling up today,’ it is unlikely that
he or she would describe an image involving an up-
ward orientation. However, if the subject were asked
‘How far up do you feel?’ ‘What do you mean by up?’
etc., then the subject would start visualizing the sche-
ma in question and provide appropriate description
of the image schema.
According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999),
such schemas guide the formation of common con-
cepts. As an example, consider the image schema of
an impediment. An impediment is something, such as
a wall, a boulder, another person, etc., that blocks
forward movement. We know from actual experience
that we can go around an impediment, over it, under
it, through it, or else remove it and continue on. On
the other hand, the impediment could successfully
impede us, so that we would have to stop at the
impediment and turn back. All of these actions can
be easily imagined in the mind. These are derivatives
of familiarity with actual impediments. Now, as
Lakoff and Johnson have persuasively argued, the
very same image schema is used unconsciously to
form abstract concepts. It is the psychological reason
why we say such things as: ‘We got through that
difficult time’; ‘Jim felt better after he got over his
cold’; ‘You want to steer clear of financial debt’;
‘With the bulk of the work out of the way, he was
able to call it a day’; ‘The rain stopped us from
enjoying our picnic’; ‘You cannot go any further
Figure 1 Using three lines to represent different figures.
with that idea; you’ll just have to turn back’; and
so on and so forth. Image schemas are, clearly, crucial
in abstract concept-formation, linking bodily and
perceptual experiences.
Visual Representation
Drawing pictures, making charts, sketching dia-
grams, and the like are such common things that we
hardly ever realize what they involve. They are part of
an innate semiotic competence that allows people to
utilize a sensory modality, such as sight, to represent
the world through signs.
Visual representation has been studied under vari-
ous rubrics both within semiotics and in other disci-
plines. The focus in semiotics is on the use of
elemental signifiers (forms) such as points, lines, and
shapes (Dondis, 1986) that are combined in various
ways to represent figures. Consider, for instance,
what can be accomplished with three straight lines.
These can be joined up in specific configurations to
represent by resemblance a triangle, the letter ‘H’, or
a picnic table (among other things) (see Figure 1).
The use of visual signifiers in this way is called,
more specifically, iconic representation (see Iconicity:
Theory). If arrowheads are adjoined to lines, they
can be used as signifiers to represent movement and
direction (see Figure 2).
This is an indexical use of signifiers for spatial and
orientational representation (see Indexicality: Theory).
Shapes are visual signifiers designed to represent the
outline of something. For example, to show the shape
of the moon, we can draw a circle; to represent the
surface of a table we can draw a rectangle; and so
on. Virtually anything that can be perceived visually
can be represented by a combination of points, lines,
and shapes: e.g., in drawings of scenery, a cloud is
represented as a shape, a horizon as a line.
Other visual signifiers include value, color, and
texture. Value refers to the darkness or lightness of a
line or shape. It plays an important role in portraying
dark and light contrasts. Color conveys mood, feel-
ing, and atmosphere in a visual text such as a paint-
ing. This is why we speak of ‘warm,’ ‘soft,’ ‘cold,’ or
‘harsh’ colors. Color, as will be discussed below, has
culture-specific meanings: e.g., in American culture
yellow connotes cowardice, while in China it con-
notes royalty. Texture refers to the phenomenon

Figure 2 Using lines with arrowheads to represent movement and direction.
that certain visual forms (lines, shapes, etc.) evoke
tactile and other sensory modalities. Wavy lines, for
example, tend to produce a much more pleasant sen-
sation in a viewer than do angular ones. By increasing
the number of edges on angular lines, the unpleasant
sensation tends to increase proportionately. This is
strong evidence that visual representation is inter-
modal, eliciting other sensory modalities in tandem.
The term that is used to characterize this phenom-
enon is synesthesia. It is defined as the phenomenon
in which the stimulation of one sense elicits a percep-
tion that ordinarily would be elicited had another
sense been stimulated, as when a loud noise registers
as a blinding light, or vice versa.
Digital Visual Signs
Today, elemental visual signifiers have found a new
medium of representation – the digital one (Horn,
1998; Darley, 2000). Digital visual signs, such as the
icon that designates a tiny picture on a computer
screen, are proliferating. Each icon represents a
command. The system of icons, pointer, and mouse
is known as a graphical user interface (GUI), a system
that provides a user-friendly way of interacting with a
computer. Users can usually tell by the icons how to
get the computer to do what they want. Without a
GUI, the computer screen is black, and the only way
to tell the computer what to do is to type in com-
mands. There is little doubt that GUIs contributed to
the rise of the personal computer in the mid-1980s,
starting in 1984 when the Apple Computer Company
introduced the Macintosh, the first personal computer
to include a GUI. Because they make computers easy
to use, GUIs quickly became standard throughout the
computer industry. Today, most users encounter only
GUI-based programs and never have to type in com-
mands to control their computers.
Another common digital visual sign is the emoticon
(literally an icon that conveys an emotion visually).
Emoticons are strings of text characters that, when
viewed sideways, form a face expressing a particular
emotion. Common emoticons include the smiley :-)
or :) (meaning ‘I’m smiling at the joke here’), the
Visual Semiotics 443
winkey ;-) (meaning ‘I’m winking and grinning at
the joke here’), :-( (‘I’m sad about this’), :–7 (‘I’m
speaking with tongue in cheek’), :D or :-D (big
smile; ‘I’m overjoyed’), and :-O (either a yawn of
boredom or a mouth open in amazement). In an
e-mail message or newsgroup article, a letter, word,
or phrase that is encased in angle brackets, indicating
the attitude the writer takes toward what he or she
has written, is called an emotag. Often emotags have
opening and closing tags, similar to HTML tags, that
enclose a phrase or one or more sentences. For exam-
ple: <joke>You didn’t think there would really be a
joke here, did you?</joke>. Some emotags are used
as single tags, such as <grin>.
Color Signifiers
As a signifier in visual representations color has be-
come a target of much study, within both semiotics
and linguistics (e.g., Hatcher, 1974; Hilbert, 1987;
Davidoff, 1991; Hall, 1992; Hardin and Maffi,
1997; MacLaury, 1997; Tufte, 1997). At a perceptual
(concrete) level, we interpret colors as gradations of
hue on the light spectrum. Hue is the property that
leads us to give a color its name – for example, red,
orange, yellow, green, blue, or violet. But the naming
process is hardly free of cultural factors. The actual
color terms we use in English predispose us to see
‘differential categories’ of hue. Experts estimate that
we can distinguish perhaps as many as 10 million
hues. Obviously, then, our limited number of color
terms is far too inexact to describe accurately all the
hues we are potentially capable of perceiving. The
restrictions imposed on color perception by color
vocabularies are the reasons why people often have
difficulties trying to describe or match a certain color.
In a real sense, color is what the color terms in a
language say it is. Consider what happens by putting a
finger at any point on the spectrum. Only a negligible
difference in the hues immediately adjacent to the
finger at either side would be perceived by a viewer.
Depending on where one puts it, however, perception
of the difference will vary. This is because we have
become accustomed to ‘seeing’ the spectrum in terms
of the color terms of the language we speak. But there
444 Visual Semiotics
Figure 3 Differential classifications of the color spectrum.
is nothing inherently ‘natural’ about any color organi-
zational scheme; it is a reflex of linguistic vocabulary,
not of Nature. Speakers of Shona, an indigenous Afri-
can language, for instance, divide the spectrum up into
cipswuka, citema, cicena, and cipswuka (again), and
speakers of Bassa (Basa), a language of Liberia, seg-
ment it into just two categories, hui and ziza. The
relative proportional widths of the gradations that
these color categories represent vis-à-vis basic English
categories can be shown graphically (see Figure 3).
So, when an English speaker refers to something as
blue, a Shona speaker might refer to it as either cips-
wuka or citema, and a Bassa speaker as hui; referring
to something as yellow, orange, or red in English
would be translated in Bassa as ziza; and so on. In
this case, ‘reality’ is exactly what different people
‘say’ that it is. But this does not mean that the use of
a specific set of color terms blocks people from seeing
reality as others do. The color categories one has
acquired in cultural context in no way preclude the
ability to perceive the color categories used in other
cultures. This is, indeed, what a learner of another
language ends up doing when he or she studies the
new color system. The student must learn how to
reclassify the content of the spectrum in terms of
new lexical categories. Moreover, in all languages
there exist signifying resources for referring to more
specific hues on the spectrum if the situation should
require it. In English the words crimson, scarlet, ver-
milion, for instance, make it possible to refer to gra-
dations of red. But these are still felt by speakers to be
subcategories of red, not distinct color categories on
their own.
The linguists Berlin and Kay (1969) argued, more-
over, that differences in color terms are only super-
ficial matters that conceal general underlying
principles of color perception. Using the judgments
of the native speakers of 20 widely divergent lan-
guages, they came to the conclusion that there were
‘focal points’ in basic (single-term) color systems
that clustered and evolved in certain predictable
ways. They identified eleven focal points, which
corresponded to the English words red, pink, orange,
yellow, brown, green, blue, purple, black, white, and
gray. Not all the languages they investigated had
separate words for each of these colors, but there
emerged a pattern that suggested to them the exis-
tence of a fixed way of perceiving color across cul-
tures. If a language had two colors, then they were
equivalents of English black and white. If it had three,
then the third one corresponded to red. A four-term
system had either yellow or green, while a five-
term system had both of these. A six-term system in-
cluded blue; a seven-term system had brown. Finally,
terms for purple, pink, orange, and gray were found
to occur in any combination in languages that had the
previous focal colors. Berlin and Kay found that lan-
guages with, say, a four-term system consisting of
black, white, red, and brown did not exist. Berlin
and Kay called this the universal color system.
The intriguing implications of Berlin and Kay’s re-
search were pursued vigorously in the 1970s by many
linguists and psychologists. Eleanor Rosch (e.g., 1975),
for instance, demonstrated that the Dani people of
West Irian, who have a two-color system similar to
the Bassa system described above, were able to discrim-
inate easily eight focal colors. Using a recognition-
memory experiment, Rosch found that the Dani
recognized focal colors better than non-focal ones.
She also found that they learned new colors more easily
when the color names were paired with focal colors.
Such findings suggested to Rosch that languages
provided a guide to the interpretation of color, but
they do not affect its perception in any way.
But many problems remain to this day with the
conclusions reached by these color researchers. For
one thing, the fact that the eleven focal colors posited
by Berlin and Kay corresponded to the color terms of
their own language (English) is suspicious. Could the
researchers have been predisposed by their own lan-
guage to gloss all other terms according to the English
categories? Many of the terms Berlin and Kay listed,
some critics have also pointed out, turn out to be
borrowings (color terms taken and/or adapted from
other languages), which would greatly undermine
their theory. The focal points of Berlin and Kay’s
theory would seem to be no more than the points on
the color spectrum categorized by the language to
which they had become accustomed.
Semiotically speaking, color terms are verbal sig-
nifiers that predispose people to attend primarily to
the hues they encode. This is a practical strategy;
otherwise, millions of terms would need to be
invented to classify the spectrum accurately. But the
semiotic story of color does not stop there. Through-
out the world colors are used for representational
purposes. The archeological record strongly suggests,

Figure 4 A three-dimensional figure represented on a two-
dimensional surface.
in fact, that sensory and emotional meanings attached
to colors may even have been the source for the color
terms themselves (Wescott, 1980). In Hittite, for in-
stance, words for colors initially designated plant and
tree names such as poplar, elm, cherry, oak, etc.; in
Hebrew, the name of the first man, Adam, meant ‘red’
and ‘alive,’ and still today, in many languages, red
signifies ‘living’ and ‘beautiful.’ In all societies, colors
play a critical function in the realm of symbolism. The
Navajo of North America, for instance, allocate to
colors a hierarchy of symbolic importance – blue is
‘good’ and red ‘bad’; nation societies perceive great
significance in the colors of flags and national
emblems; and the list could go on and on.
Visual Texts
A text is anything that has been put together
with signs to represent something. Lines and shapes,
for example, can also be combined to create three-
dimensional figures, which are visual texts that create
an illusion of depth in the viewer. In the visual text of
Figure 4 there are 12 lines. The way they are put
together, however, makes us perceive the text as a
three-dimensional box (see Figure 4).
Although the figure has been drawn on a two-
dimensional surface, we cannot help but perceive it
as a three-dimensional box. The reason for this is
that, as a visual text, it has been drawn with the
technique of ‘perspective drawing.’ This deceives us,
in effect, to view objects as the human eye perceives
them. The flat surface of any drawn figure is known
as the picture plane; the horizon line is called the
horizontal eye-level line that divides the scene in
the distance; and the vanishing point is located on
the horizon line where parallel lines in the scene
appear to converge. This makes certain parts of the
figure appear to be closer than others (see Figure 5).
Visual Semiotics 445
Figure 5 A figure drawn in perspective.
Perspective drawing is, in a phrase, the technique
of creating an illusion of depth or length in two-
dimensional surface drawings. As a historical foot-
note, it should be noted that the craft of perspective
drawing dates back to the Renaissance, after the Italian
artist Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) developed the
technique in Western painting.
There are many and varied types of visual texts,
from paintings and drawings to maps, blueprints,
comics, and the like, that have become targets of
specialized areas of semiotics. Some of these, such
as comic books, involve the use of both verbal
and visual techniques, producing very effective texts
(see Semiotics of Architecture; Cartography: Semiot-
ics; Comics: Semiotic Approaches; Photography:
Semiotics; Pictography: Semiotic Approaches).
Visual texts have an effect on perception, and can
even mislead it. As a concrete example, consider the
classic illusion in which the line AB appears to be
longer than line CD (see Figure 6).
In actual fact the lines are equal in length, but the
orientation of the arrowheads fools the eye into see-
ing AB as longer than CD. In some areas of the world,
however, psychologists have found that people see the
lines as equal in length. The factor behind this illusion
is thus cultural, not biological – visual perception is
intrinsically intertwined with representational prac-
tices. Psychologists have found that people living in
cultures that have never been exposed to illustrated
magazines are unable to recognize the photographs in
the magazines as visual representations of human
beings (Deregowski, 1972; Dunning, 1991). They
tend to perceive them, rather, as smudges on the
paper. Such erroneous interpretation of the photo-
graphs is not due to defects of intelligence or eyesight;
on the contrary, the individuals are clear-sighted
and highly intelligent. Their primary assumptions
are different, because they have acquired a different
system of visual representation that blocks them from
perceiving the photographs in the same manner that
those accustomed to viewing magazines perceive
them.
446 Visual Semiotics
Figure 6 Classic optical illusion.
Two types of visual texts that have been targets of
great interest within visual semiotics are diagrams
and charts. A diagram is a schematic drawing using
basic visual signifiers (points, lines, shapes, etc.)
designed to ‘explain’ visually how something works
or to clarify the relationship between the parts of a
whole. A chart is a diagram that is designed to con-
tain and display information of various kinds. Dia-
grams are cognitively powerful visual texts that are
indispensable in science and, typically, are the sum
and substance of theory-making. The diagram of the
atom as a miniature solar system with a nucleus and
orbiting particles is, ipso facto, a theory of the atom,
allowing us to envision it in a particular way.
The common use of diagrams and charts through-
out the world suggests that sight is a dominant mo-
dality in conception and knowledge-making. The
science of geometry is an exemplar of this point.
Geometry is about ‘ideal visual forms’ such as trian-
gles, circles, and squares. Amazingly, such forms have
allowed us to draw inferences about reality and
about ourselves. Ancient Greek geometry provided,
in fact, the basic ideas that came to characterize the
modern system of scientific investigation. Geometric
diagrams, and theorems about them, have applica-
tions to the real world. In the history of science, this
kind of ‘diagrammatic cognition’ has produced truly
remarkable results. This is because, as the ancient
Greek geometers emphasized, it permits representa-
tions of various aspects of physical reality which, in
turn, allow for an intellectual experimentation with
that very reality through the use of symbolic reasoning
(e.g., the many scenarios suggested by the Pythagore-
an Theorem). The results of this experimentation can
then be redirected to the real world to see what they
yield. Symbolic reasoning in such areas of human
thought carries the burden over intuition.
Writing
Although now considered a separate field of its
own, within both semiotics and linguistics, writing
is also included under the visual semiotic rubric.
Writing has always been perceived as having a mysti-
cal function, not just a purely representational one.
The ancient Egyptians called their writing system
hieroglyphic because they used it to record hymns
and prayers, to register the names and titles of indi-
viduals and deities, and to record various community
activities – hieroglyphic derives from Greek hieros
‘holy’ and glyphein ‘to carve’ (Goldwasser, 1995). In
their origins most scripts were deemed to have sacred
or mystical function – for example, the Cretans attrib-
uted the origin of writing to Zeus, the Sumerians to
Nabu, the Egyptians to Toth, the Greeks to Hermes,
and so on.
The earliest form of writing was pictographic. This
consisted of drawing pictures to represent objects.
For example, a circle was used typically to represent
the sun and a wavy line to represent a river. So intui-
tive is pictography that it comes as little surprise
to find that it has not disappeared from even alpha-
bet-based cultures. The figures designating male
and female on washroom doors and the no-smoking
signs found in public buildings, to mention but two
common examples, are modern-day pictographs.
One of the first civilizations to institutionalize
pictographic writing as a means of recording ideas,
keeping track of business transactions, and trans-
mitting knowledge was the ancient Chinese one.
According to some archeological estimates, Chinese
pictography may date as far back as the 15th century
B.C.E. Another fully developed ancient pictographic
system was the Sumerian-Babylonian one that was
developed nearly five thousand years ago. The Sumer-
ians recorded their pictographic representations on
clay tablets with wedge-shaped forms, hence the
name cuneiform. Cuneiform writing was a very ex-
pensive and impracticable means of writing. For this
reason it was developed, learned, and used primarily
by rulers and clerics. In Egypt, hieroglyphic writing
emerged around 2700 to 2500 B.C.E. The Egyptians
used papyrus (a type of early paper made from reeds)
to record their writings, making it more practicable
for many more classes of people.
More abstract forms of pictographic signs are
called ideographs. These may bear some resemblance
to their referents, but require acquired knowledge of
the relation between picture and referent on the
part of the user. International symbols for such things
as public telephones, washrooms, etc., are all ideo-
graphic. More abstract ideographs are known as
logographs. A logographic system combines various
pictographs and/or ideographs for the purpose of
indicating nonpicturable ideas. For example, the
Chinese pictographs for sun and tree are combined
to represent the Chinese spoken word for east. The
first syllabaries – systems of signs standing for sylla-
bles – developed from such amalgamated systems.
Syllabaries are still used in some cultures. Japanese,
for example, is still written with two complete

syllabaries – the hiragana and the katakana – devised
to supplement the characters originally taken over
from Chinese.
To facilitate the speed of writing, the Sumerians
and the Egyptians eventually streamlined their picto-
graphs and transformed them into symbols for the
actual sounds of speech. Called phonographic
writing, it consisted of signs standing for parts of
words, such as syllables or individual sounds. A com-
plete phonographic system for representing single
sounds is called alphabetic. The first alphabetic sys-
tem emerged in the Middle East around 1000 B.C., and
was then transported by the Phoenicians (a people
from a territory on the eastern coast of the Mediter-
ranean, located largely in modern-day Lebanon) to
Greece. It contained signs for consonant sounds only.
When it reached Greece, signs for vowel sounds were
added to it, making the Greek system the first full-
fledged alphabetic one.
The Greeks also started the practice of naming each
alphabet sign by such words as alpha, beta, gamma,
etc., which were imitations of Phoenician words:
aleph ‘ox,’ beth ‘house,’ gimel ‘camel,’ etc. Inciden-
tally, the idea of an ‘alphabetic order’ of letters from
A to Z emerged because the letters were used to count
the numbers in order – A stood for 1, B for 2, C for 3,
and so on. The earliest record of alphabetic order is
Psalm thirty-seven where verses follow the Hebraic
sequence.
Alphabetic writing has become the norm in many
cultures. But in every alphabetic sign, there is a picto-
graphic history and prehistory similar to the one de-
scribed above for the letter A. The pictographic
content of our letters goes unnoticed because
our eyes are no longer trained to extract pictorial
meaning from them.
Conclusion
There is no culture without visual representational
traditions and customs. These bear witness to the
fact that visual signs are perceived to be just as crucial
to human understanding, if not more so, than words.
As mentioned, the study of visual signs embraces a
number of subfields, from painting to photography,
within general semiotics. However, in its basic out-
line, the goal of visual semiotics is to study the ele-
ments of visual representation and how these help
human beings understand reality.
See also: Cartography: Semiotics; Cognitive Linguistics;
Comics: Semiotic Approaches; Iconicity: Theory; Indexi-
cality: Theory; Photography: Semiotics; Pictography: Se-
miotic Approaches; Semiotics of Architecture.
Visual Semiotics 447
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Vocabulary: Second Language
P Nation, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington,
New Zealand
ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Learning Burden
Knowing a word well involves knowing several
aspects covering the form, meaning, and use of the
word. The difficulty these aspects have for any par-
ticular word depends on how closely the aspects re-
late to knowledge the learners already have. This
knowledge can come from the learners’ first language
or other languages they know, and it can come from
the knowledge they already have of the second lan-
guage. For example, if the learners’ first language uses
the same written script as the second language, then
this will make the learning burden of the written form
of the second language much lighter. If the written
form of the second language is very regular with one
letter always representing the same sound and vice
versa, then the learning burden of the written form
will be even lighter. Similarly, if the two languages
share a lot of cognate vocabulary, some of the
learning burden will be lighter. Spanish learners
learning the academic vocabulary of English find
that these words have a light learning burden because
most have very similar forms and meanings in
English, for example acquisition and evaluation.
Finnish learners of English are faced with a more
difficult task.
Teachers can try to lighten the learning burden of a
word by explicitly relating it to known items that are
similar in the first or second language, by showing the
patterns or rules that the word fits into, and by pre-
teaching items and features that will make the new
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visual semiotics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of
the visual world. Lund: Lund University Press.
Sonesson G (1994). ‘Pictorial semiotics, Gestalt psychology,
and the ecology of perception.’ Semiotica 100, 267–
331.
Taylor J R (1995). Linguistic categorization: prototypes in
linguistic theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tufte E R (1997). Visual explanations: images and quanti-
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Wescott R (1980). Sound and sense. Lake Bluff, IL: Jupiter
Press.
word easier to learn. Before teaching a word, it is
worth doing a quick analysis of the learning burden
of the word to work out what aspects of the word the
teaching needs to focus on.
Word Form
Words that are difficult to pronounce are usually
difficult to learn (Rodgers, 1969; Ellis and Beaton,
1993). Words that are easy to pronounce can more
easily be held in working memory and thus have a
greater chance of entering long-term memory. Thus,
the words introduced early in an English course
should be easy for learners to pronounce. Substantial
listening practice and a small amount of guided
pronunciation practice can make it easier for words
with unfamiliar sounds to be learned.
Although English spelling is notorious for its irre-
gularities, there are numerous patterns and rules that
can help learning. First language research on reading
has shown that developing phonemic awareness (the
idea that words are made up of separable sounds) can
have very positive effects on learning to read English
(Ehri et al., 2001). Similarly, giving some attention to
phonics (sound-spelling relationships) can also help
with learning to read and write (Stahl et al., 1998).
A very large proportion of English words come from
French, Latin, or Greek and thus make use of pre-
fixes, suffixes, and stems that can occur in many
different words. Learning can be helped if the most
common affixes and their meanings are learned, and
often a simple explanation of a word’s etymology
(e.g., the word rank has the same stem as the word
arrange) can help learning. Irregular affixation can
increase the learning burden. Laufer’s (1997) study of