Emojis Convey Not Just Fun: Study

New York: That winky-face emoji that you use at the end of a text isn’t just a fun picture added to your sentence. It can convey linguistic meaning that changes the interpretation of the sentence, finds a new study. The findings showed that the brain processes ironic emojis in the same way as ironic language, indicating emojis convey meaning in a sentence. “Emojis are ubiquitous. They are seemingly everywhere, and people use them a lot in text messages and online along with language,” said Benjamin Weissman, doctoral student at the University of Illinois in the US. Words combined with emojis can be considered another form a multimodal communication, similar to words plus gestures or words plus facial expressions, the researchers said.

“Spoken and signed languages evolved long before humans developed written representations of language, and spoken and signed languages have ways of enhancing or changing meaning through mechanisms like intonation or gesture,” Weissman added. “Emojis can convey irony or sarcasm in a written format in the same way we might use intonation to convey the same thing when speaking,” he noted. (IANS)