Compositional Affordances of Emoji Sequences

Article Sidebar

View PDF
Published: Dec 20, 2024
Updated: 2024-12-20
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14434/li.v22.40795
Keywords:
emoji, sequences, experiment, interpretability
Issue
Section
Special Issue on Graphicons in Digital Communication

Main Article Content

Benjamin Weissman
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Jan Engelen
Tilburg University
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1885-3530
Lena Thamsen
Tilburg University
Neil Cohn
Tilburg University
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0074-1995

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.




Article Details

How to Cite
Weissman, B., Engelen, J., Thamsen, L., & Cohn, N. (2024). Compositional Affordances of Emoji Sequences. Language@Internet, 22(Special Issue), 57–73. https://doi.org/10.14434/li.v22.40795
Author Biographies

Benjamin Weissman, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Benjamin Weissman [weissb2@rpi.edu] is a Lecturer in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research explores the real-time processing of meaning across a range of linguistic and communicative phenomena, including, especially, emoji.

Jan Engelen, Tilburg University

Jan Engelen [j.a.a.engelen@tilburguniversity.edu] is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University. His research interests include embodied cognition and language comprehension at the sentence and text level.

Lena Thamsen, Tilburg University

Lena Thamsen is a former master’s student at Tilburg University, Netherlands. She graduated in 2019 in the study program Business Communication and Digital Media. In her master thesis she evaluated the impact of linearity on emoji sequences.

Neil Cohn, Tilburg University

Neil Cohn [neilcohn@visuallanguagelab.com] is Associate Professor of Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University. He studies the linguistic structure and (neuro)cognition of graphic and multimodal communication, particularly emoji and the visual languages used in comics.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Licensing and Reuse: Unless another option is selected below, reuse of the published Work will be governed by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ). This lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the Work non-commercially; although new works must acknowledge the original Language@Internet publication and be non-commercial, they do not have to be licensed on the same terms.