Enhancing children’s museum experience: a linguistic study of the MoMA audio pictorial descriptions

In line with the definition of institutions as being “in the service of society” (ICOM 2022), over the past decade museums have developed new communication strategies to promote accessibility and inclusion in cultural heritage experiences. In pursuit of this goal, they have sought to diversify their communication approaches to reach categories of visitors that may not always have equal access to museum experiences, such as people with visual impairments or children. As a result, new and complex forms of communication have been created to meet the needs of these specific visitor groups. This paper aims to investigate museum communication for children focusing on the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan. The study proposes a linguistic investigation of a corpus of twenty audio-delivered pictorial descriptions in English, designed for normally sighted children. Building on the results of a previous investigation, the analysis focuses on the questions and invitations found in the scripts, and more specifically on the verbs used in these segments and the semantic categories they activate. To this end, the segments of the scripts containing questions and invitations were automatically semantically tagged using the free USAS English web tagger (UCREL Semantic Analysis System). The tagging results were interpreted using the USAS Semantic Tagset, and the main semantic categories were identified. Finally, the use of verbs was analysed in context and framed within Faber and Mairal’s (1999) taxonomy of domains of the primary lexicon of English verbs. In the conclusions, the results of the analysis are discussed from the perspective of popularization strategies. Keywords: Museum of Modern Art; museum communication; popularization for children; social inclusion; semantic categories.