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In this article addressed to teachers, author Julia Csillag cites research on the use of wordless texts to teach students with autism spectrum disorder. Wordless texts can be used to address a variety of skills that autistic students typically struggle with, including diverse literacy skills, cognitive flexibility, and nonverbal communication. Removing words and auditory information also supports autistic students since integrating information from multiple senses can take longer in autistic individuals, particularly if this information is linguistic. Removing words can therefore positively influence processing. Using wordless books or movies can build diverse literacy skills in terms of making inferences, understanding narrative structure, and using evidence to support a claim. All wordless "texts" support individuals' ability to make inferences, which is helpful since research shows that "students with Asperger syndrome…had challenges in making inferences from the text" (Knight & Sartrini, 2014). Moreover, researchers have found that "similar processes contribute to comprehension of narratives across different media" (Kendeou, P. et al, 2009), meaning that addressing visual inferences can transfer to inferences made during reading. Images and silent books or movies necessarily require students to infer what is happening, who the characters are, etc.

My favorite: "mamihlapinatapei," meaning "the wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start." Note (via Language Log) that by "untranslatable," the author really means that there's no one English word which corresponds exactly with the foreign word. Clearly, the words are translatable, just as English phrases.

Decoding pictures as part of communication has been at the root of written language since there was such a thing as written language. "What is virtually certain," writes Andrew Robinson in Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction, is "that the first written symbols began life as pictures." Pictograms-i.e., pictures of actual things, like a drawing of the sun-were the very first elements of written communication, found in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. From pictograms, which are literal representations, we moved to logograms, which are symbols that stand in for a word ($, for example) and ideograms, which are pictures or symbols that represent an idea or abstract concept. Emoji can somewhat magically function as pictograms and ideograms at the same time.

emojis were born from a man named Shigetaka Kurita back in the late 1990s. They came up with emojis as a way to appeal to teens. Emoji which is a japanese neologism means "picture word". A bunch of different emojis can actually be traced back to some Japanese custom or tradition.