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The Lexicon of Emoji?: Conventionality Modulates Processing of Emoji

Weissman,Benjamin
; 
Engelen,Jan
; 
Baas,Elise
; 
Cohn,Neil
Abstract
Emoji have been ubiquitous in communication for over a decade, yet how they derive meaning remains underexplored. Here, we examine an aspect fundamental to linguistic meaning-making: the degree to which emoji have conventional lexicalized meanings and whether that conventionalization affects processing in real-time. Experiment 1 establishes a range of meaning agreement levels across emoji within a population; Experiment 2 measures accuracy and response times to word-emoji pairings in a match/mismatch task. In this experiment, we found that accuracy and response time both correlated significantly with the level of population-wide meaning agreement from Experiment 1, suggesting that lexical access of single emoji may be comparable to that of words, even out of context. This is consistent with theories of a multimodal lexicon that stores links between meaning, structure, and modality in long-term memory. Altogether, these findings suggest that emoji can allow a range of entrenched, lexicalized representations.
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Publisher Copyright: © 2023 Cognitive Science Society LLC.
Date
2023-04
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Tilburg University Research Output Collection
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Keywords
Emoji, Language processing, Lexicon, Visual language
Citation
Weissman, B, Engelen, J, Baas, E & Cohn, N 2023, 'The Lexicon of Emoji? Conventionality Modulates Processing of Emoji', Cognitive Science, vol. 47, no. 4, e13275. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13275
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14602/80243
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info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
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