His theories on visual language provided the foundation for the creation of automatically generated news comics for the BBC.
He then spent several years as an independent scholar before studying under linguist Ray Jackendoff and psychologists Gina Kuperberg and Phillip Holcomb at Tufts University where he received his PhD in psychology in 2012.
While narrative grammar uses a discourse level of information, its function and structure is similar to syntax in that it organizes categorical roles in hierarchic constituents in order to express meaning.
[11][12][13] In 2020, Cohn was awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council to study cross-cultural diversity in the structures of the visual languages used in comics around the world by building a multicultural corpus of annotated comics, and to examine the relationship of those structures to those in spoken languages.
[15] Beyond illustrating his academic books, Cohn’s creative work appears in several graphic novels, like We the People: A Call to Take Back America (2004) with Thom Hartmann, and illustrations for academic works, including Ray Jackendoff’s A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning (2012), and the comic strip “Chinese Room” with philosopher Daniel Dennett.