Semantic Congruency Facilitates Memory for Emojis

Andriana L. Christofalos, Laurie Beth Feldman, Heather Sheridan


Abstract
Emojis can assume different relations with the sentence context in which they occur. While affective elaboration and emoji-word redundancy are frequently investigated in laboratory experiments, the role of emojis in inferential processes has received much less attention. Here, we used an online ratings task and a recognition memory task to investigate whether differences in emoji function within a sentence affect judgments of emoji-text coherence and subsequent recognition accuracy. Emojis that function as synonyms of a target word from the passages were rated as better fitting with the passage (more coherent) than emojis consistent with an inference from the passage, and both types of emojis were rated as more coherent than incongruent (unrelated) emojis. In a recognition test, emojis consistent with the semantic content of passages (synonym and inference emojis) were better recognized than incongruent emojis. Findings of the present study provide corroborating evidence that readers extract semantic information from emojis and then integrate it with surrounding passage content.
Anthology ID:
2022.emoji-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, Washington, USA
Editors:
Sanjaya Wijeratne, Jennifer Lee, Horacio Saggion, Amit Sheth
Venue:
Emoji
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
63–68
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emoji-1.7
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emoji-1.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andriana L. Christofalos, Laurie Beth Feldman, and Heather Sheridan. 2022. Semantic Congruency Facilitates Memory for Emojis. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media, pages 63–68, Seattle, Washington, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Semantic Congruency Facilitates Memory for Emojis (Christofalos et al., Emoji 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emoji-1.7.pdf