Bottom-Up and Top-Down Cues in a Comics Reading Task

Readers are increasingly exposed to text that includes both words and images through comics, graphic novels, online materials, and video games. In this study, we use the medium of the 4-panel comic strip to examine how readers make meaning of the word/image composite. We propose a cognitive interactive framework that incorporates both the bottom-up constraints of verbal and visual cues and top-down constraints imposed by global narrative structures to assess the contributions of each in the meaning-making process. Previous research has focused more on the qualitative and sociocultural approaches while this study uses cognitive and quantitative perspectives to explore the meaning making of text that includes both words and images. Results of our analyses show that both bottom-up and top-down constraints make significant and separable contributions to the variance in a comprehension task.