Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 Jun;28(3):978-991.
doi: 10.3758/s13423-020-01864-y. Epub 2021 Jan 28.

Are emojis processed like words?: Eye movements reveal the time course of semantic processing for emojified text

Eliza Barach  1 , Laurie Beth Feldman  2 , Heather Sheridan  2
Affiliations

Are emojis processed like words?: Eye movements reveal the time course of semantic processing for emojified text

Eliza Barach et al. Psychon Bull Rev. 2021 Jun.

Abstract

Emojis have many functions that support reading. Most obviously, they convey semantic information and support reading comprehension (Lo, CyberPsychology & Behavior, 11[5], 595-597, 2008; Riordan, Computers in Human Behavior, 76, 75-86, 2017b). However, it is undetermined whether emojis recruit the same perceptual and cognitive processes for identification and integration during reading as do words. To investigate whether emojis are processed like words, we used eye tracking to examine the time course of semantic processing of emojis during reading. Materials consisted of sentences containing a target word (e.g., coffee in the sentence "My tall coffee is just the right temperature") when there was no emoji present and when there was a semantically congruent (i.e., synonymous) emoji (e.g., the cup of coffee emoji, ) or an incongruent emoji (e.g., the beer mug emoji, ) present at the end of the sentence. Similar to congruency effects with words, congruent emojis were fixated for shorter periods and were less likely to be refixated than were incongruent emojis. In addition, congruent emojis were more frequently skipped than incongruent emojis, which suggests that semantic aspects of emoji processing begin in the parafovea. Finally, the presence of an emoji, relative to its absence increased target-word skipping rates and reduced total time on target words. We discuss the implications of our findings for models of eye-movement control during reading.

Keywords: Emojis; Eye movements and reading; Parafoveal processing; Reading models.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Barach, E., Srinivasan, V., Fernandes, R. B., Feldman, L. B., & Shaikh, S. (2020). It’s not just what you tweet, it’s how you tweet it. Paper presented at the 7th European Conference on Social Media, Larnaca, Cyprus.
    1. Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., Tily, H. J. (2013) Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language 68(3):255-278
    1. Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. ArXiv. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i0
    1. Brysbaert, M., & New, B. (2009). Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavior Research Methods, 41(4), 977–990. https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.41.4.977 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Cohn, N. (2016). A multimodal parallel architecture: A cognitive framework for multimodal interactions. Cognition, 146, 304–323. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.10.007 - DOI - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources