Emojis in Sentence Processing: An Electrophysiological Approach
This paper discusses two multi-experiment studies using the ERP methodology to investigate neural correlates of processing linguistic emojis. The first study examined the use of wink emojis used to mark irony and found the same ERP response complex that has been found in response to word-generated irony. Contingent upon individual differences in interpretation, these emojis are processed the same way as ironic words. The second study investigated the prediction of non-face emojis substituted for nouns. When predictability was high, unexpected emojis elicited the same ERP response patterns as words. Overall, the results of these two studies suggest that emojis used linguistically are processed in the same way as words and that individuals can integrate input from multiple modalities into a holistic representation of a single utterance.
How deep is your emotion? Emojis facial expressions on the emotional processing of text messages
Despite emojis are already an integral part of human communication, little is known about how their use may affect the emotional processing of the text messages sent in platforms such as WhatsApp or Twitter. Here, we aimed to analyze how the brief presentation (34 ms) of emojis congruent with the emotional content of sentences designed to represent the five basic emotions, and neutral situations, relative to their verbal equivalents or the absence of any stimulus as control, affects the processing of the emotional content of these sentences using an affective appraisal task combined with the masked priming paradigm. Results showed that, although the use of emojis did not appear to affect the level of arousal elicited by the sentences, they did impact the speed with which these responses were made, though only in sentences associated with the emotions of sadness and disgust. Specifically, in these sentences, the prior presentation of the emoji produced longer responses when compared to the control stimulus. These results suggest that the use of emojis does not seem to offer advantages in the emotional processing of written messages, at least at early stages of processing.
Familial Handedness and Access to Words, Meaning, and Syntax during Sentence Comprehension
We compared right-handed familial dextral (FS-) and familial sinistral (FS+) participants who were aged either 10-13 years (children) or 18-23 years (adults). In word probe and associative probe tasks, FS+ adults responded faster than all other groups and FS+ children responded more slowly than all other groups. In the word probe task, only the FS- adults showed a significant effect of the serial position of the target word. We interpret these differences to support an analysis-by-synthesis model of comprehension in which individuals who differ in familial handedness and age emphasize different linguistic representations during comprehension. In general, FS+ individuals focus on words and meaning, while FS- individuals focus on syntactic representations. In FS+ individuals, age-related experiences with language produce a shift in responding from compositional meaning to words and their associations. In FS- individuals, age-related experiences with language produce a shift toward responding based more on detailed syntactic representations, including the serial order of words and possibly the structural roles of clauses.