The processing of emoji-word substitutions: A self-paced-reading study

In computer-mediated communication, emojis can be used for various purposes. As small graphical images, many emojis depict abstract or concrete objects ideogrammatically. We report on a self-paced reading experiment of sentences containing emojis. We tested to what extent emojis encode lexical meanings when used in a sentence context. First, we confirm earlier findings that sentence comprehension does not suffer when emojis replace words. Second, we show that in addition to the graphically encoded concept, emojis in some cases enable the retrieval of an entire lexical entry, including the phonological value of the associated word. This means that even emojis showing a homophonous noun to the target word, such as "palm (tree)" for "palm (of hand)" can be interpreted correctly in context. Based on measured differences in the reading times between words, emojis depicting the intended target referent, and emojis depicting a homophonous noun, we propose a context dependent account of emoji interpretation.