Can an emoji be a lie? The links between emoji meaning, commitment, and lying

Weissman, Benjamin

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2023.11.004

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Weissman et al (2023) found evidence for a high degree of lexical entrenchment for emojis with conventionalized meanings. According to experiments presented by Weissman (2022) and Weissman (2024), such emojis commit the author of a message to their meaning, and they can be used to tell a lie.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic differences in visually similar face emojis

Fricke,

Grosz,

Scheffler

2024

Lang. cogn.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The literature on face emojis raises the central question whether they should be treated as pictures or conventionalized signals. Our experiment addresses this question by investigating semantic differences in visually similar face emojis. We test a prediction following from a pictorial approach: small visual features of emojis that do not correspond to human facial features should be semantically less relevant than features that represent aspects of facial expressions. We compare emoji pairs with a visual difference that either does or does not correspond to a difference in a human facial expression according to an adaptation of the Facial Action Coding System. We created two contexts per pair, each fitted to correspond to a prominent meaning of one or the other emoji. Participants had to choose a suitable emoji for each context. The rate at which the context-matching emoji was chosen was significantly above chance for both types of emoji pairs and it did not differ significantly between them. Our results show that the small differences are meaningful in all pairs whether or not they correspond to human facial differences. This supports a lexicalist approach to emoji semantics, which treats face emojis as conventionalized signals rather than mere pictures of faces.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%