Psychological Sciences Department, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA.
The Spark of Hudson, Hudson, NY, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2024 Jun;31(3):1335-1347. doi: 10.3758/s13423-023-02411-1. Epub 2023 Nov 27.
As reliance on digital communication grows, so does the importance of communicating effectively with text. Yet when communicating with text, benefits from other channels, such as hand gesture, are diminished. Hand gestures support comprehension and disambiguate characteristics of the spoken message by providing information in a visual channel supporting speech. Can emoji (pictures used to supplement text communication) perform similar functions? Here, we ask whether emoji improve comprehension of indirect speech. Indirect speech is ambiguous, and appropriate comprehension depends on the receiver decoding context cues, such as hand gesture. We adapted gesture conditions from prior research (Kelly et al., 1999, Experiment 2) to a digital, text-based format, using emoji rather than gestures. Participants interpreted 12 hypothetical text-message exchanges that ended with indirect speech, communicated via text only, text+emoji, or emoji only, in a between-subjects design. Like that previously seen for hand gesture, emoji improved comprehension. Participants were more likely to correctly interpret indirect speech in the emoji-only condition compared with the text+emoji and the text-only conditions, and more likely in the text+emoji condition compared to the text-only condition. Thus, emoji are not mere decoration, but rather are integrated with text to communicate and disambiguate complex messages. Similar to gesture in face-to-face communication, emoji improve comprehension during text-based communication.
随着对数字通信的依赖日益增加，用文本进行有效沟通的重要性也越来越大。然而，在用文本进行沟通时，手势等其他渠道的优势就会减弱。手势通过提供支持言语的视觉渠道信息，支持理解并消除言语信息的歧义。表情符号（用于补充文本通信的图片）能起到类似的作用吗？在这里，我们探讨了表情符号是否能提高对间接引语的理解。间接引语具有歧义性，正确理解需要接收者解码上下文线索，如手势。我们改编了先前研究（Kelly 等人，1999 年，实验 2）中的手势条件，将其应用于数字文本格式，使用表情符号而不是手势。参与者在一个被试间设计中，通过仅文本、文本+表情符号或仅表情符号的方式，解释了 12 个以间接引语结束的假设文本消息交流。与之前的手势研究类似，表情符号也提高了理解。与文本+表情符号和仅文本条件相比，参与者在仅表情符号条件下更有可能正确解释间接引语，而在文本+表情符号条件下比仅文本条件下更有可能正确解释。因此，表情符号不仅仅是装饰，而是与文本相结合，用于传达和消除复杂信息的歧义。与面对面交流中的手势相似，表情符号在基于文本的交流中提高了理解。
