Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Aug 15;13(8):e0201727. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0201727. eCollection 2018.
Emojis are ideograms that are becoming ubiquitous in digital communication. However, no research has yet investigated how humans process semantic and pragmatic content of emojis in real time. We investigated neural responses to irony-producing emojis, the question being whether emoji-generated irony is processed similarly to word-generated irony. Previous ERP studies have routinely found P600 effects to verbal irony. Our research sought to identify whether the same neural responses could also be elicited by emoji-induced irony. In three experiments, participants read sentences that ended in either a congruent, incongruent, or ironic (wink) emoji. Results across all three experiments demonstrated clear P600 effects, the amplitudes of which were correlated with participants' tendency to treat the emoji as a marker of irony, as indicated by behavioral comprehension question responses. These ironic wink emojis also elicited a strong P200 effect, also found in studies of verbal irony processing. Moreover, unexpected emojis (both mismatch and ironic emoji) also elicited late frontal positivities, which have been implicated processing unpredicted words in context. These results are the first to identify how linguistically-relevant ideograms are processed in real-time at the neural level, and specifically draw parallels between the processing of word- and emoji-induced irony.
表情符号是表意符号，在数字通信中变得无处不在。然而，目前还没有研究调查人类如何实时处理表情符号的语义和语用内容。我们研究了对产生反讽的表情符号的神经反应，问题是表情符号产生的反讽是否与单词产生的反讽类似。先前的 ERP 研究通常发现言语反讽会产生 P600 效应。我们的研究旨在确定同样的神经反应是否也可以由表情符号引起的反讽引起。在三个实验中，参与者阅读以一致、不一致或讽刺（眨眼）表情符号结尾的句子。所有三个实验的结果都清楚地显示出 P600 效应，其幅度与参与者将表情符号视为反讽标记的倾向相关，这由行为理解问题的回答表明。这些讽刺的眨眼表情符号还引起了强烈的 P200 效应，这在言语反讽处理的研究中也发现了。此外，意想不到的表情符号（不匹配和讽刺表情符号）也引起了额前正波，这与在语境中处理未预测单词有关。这些结果是首次确定语言相关的表意符号如何在神经水平上实时处理的，并且特别在单词和表情符号引起的反讽之间进行了比较。
