Processing network emojis in Chinese sentence context: An ERP study

As network emojis play an increasingly important role in modern communications, the question of how semantic processing of emojis is performed in the context arises. By comparing the N400 and P600 effects of emojis and words in contextually incongruent conditions, we investigated the neural basis of semantic processing of emojis. We found that incongruent words elicited robust N400 and P600 effects, while emojis only generated a more conspicuous and sustained N400 effect. This suggests that emojis may have more difficult semantic retrieval versus words in the context, with potentially inefficient semantic integration. These data suggest that the semantic processing of network emojis in context is not the same as words and the meaning of emojis is more difficult to process at sentence level.