Interpersonal and Parasocial Relationships in Mercer Mayer’s Frog Stories: a Multimodal-Semiotic analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ikala.353885Keywords:
children's literature, visual literacy, multimodal analysis, semiotic analysis, Frog Stories, wordless booksAbstract
Frog Stories, Mercer Mayer’s series of six wordless books, has often been used in various research studies in clinical settings, but its communicative particularities have been consistently overlooked. This study focuses on the multimodal semiotic analysis of this work to identify their discursive features. This multimodal study follows a quantitative and qualitative methodology to identify, quantify, and interpret the resources and interactive relationships referred to focalization, social distance and attitude that the use of certain semiotic resources provokes in the 150 illustrations of the series. The results of the analysis indicate that the first album book employs varied semiotic resources, while the rest systematically use the same elements in their narrative construction: supply images, unmediated perspective, social distance and an attitude of equality between the characters and the reader. These choices are connected with the interactive relationships they provoke and with the semiotic codes they allude to. On the other hand, the repeated use of the same resources promotes the reader to build different parasocial relationships with the characters represented. These resources can influence the reader’s positioning and condition his or her reading comprehension and interpretation. We conclude by pointing out the importance of multimodal semiotic analysis, given its implications in reading comprehension.
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