Compositional Affordances of Emoji Sequences
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Abstract
Emoji have become ubiquitous in digital communication, and while research has explored how emoji communicate meaning, relatively little work has investigated the affordances of such meaning-making processes. We here investigate the constraints of emoji by testing participant preferences for emoji combinations, comparing linearly sequenced, “language-like” emoji strings to more “picture-like” analog representations of the same two emoji. Participants deemed the picture-like combinations more comprehensible and were faster to respond to them compared to the sequential emoji strings. This suggests that while in-line sequences of emoji are on the whole interpretable, combining them in a linear, side-by-side, word-like way may be relatively unnatural for the combinatorial affordances of the graphic modality.
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