What Did They Mean by That? Young Adults' Interpretations of 105 Common Emojis

Speech acts and the communicative functions of emojis in LIHKG online discussion forum amid COVID-19

Since the beginning of 2022, the Hong Kong government has imposed strict social distancing measures and changed its stance on various regional policies with the aim to contain the so-called 'fifth wave' of COVID-19. In these pandemic and 'infodemic' times filled with uncertainty and fear, Hong Kong netizens used local online discussion forums as a resource to establish an innovative form of 'helping network.' This study is based on 230 posts from a popular local online discussion forum 'LIHKG' in February 2022 when the pandemic was regarded as most critical by the Department of Health. Speech Acts theoretic approach was adopted to explore how forum users employed speech acts to perform various communicative practices such as expressing concerns, asking for information, and engaging with others in a CMC environment amid a global health crisis. Representatives were found to be the most dominant text-based speech acts, followed by directives, expressives and commissives. Speech acts provide forum users a context in which emoji usage occurs. Forum users not only make use of words to 'do' things in the online self-help forum, but they also employ emojis to either supplement or complement speech acts. This study also shows that emojis perform multiple functions in the discussion posts and argues that they do not merely function as emotion indicators of their textual company, but also carry significant pragmatic meanings by illustrating how they can also carry illocutionary force and in some cases, even alter the illocutionary force of their preceding texts. The findings of this study enhance our understanding of how forum users communicate via verbal and nonverbal means within the underexplored 'helping domain' of online discussion forums. It also suggests that online discussion forum interactions need to be approached differently than other better understood alternatives.

Is speech intelligibility what speech intelligibility tests test?

Natural, conversational speech signals contain sources of symbolic and iconic information, both of which are necessary for the full understanding of speech. But speech intelligibility tests, which are generally derived from written language, present only symbolic information sources, including lexical semantics and syntactic structures. Speech intelligibility tests exclude almost all sources of information about talkers, including their communicative intentions and their cognitive states and processes. There is no reason to suspect that either hearing impairment or noise selectively affect perception of only symbolic information. We must therefore conclude that diagnosis of good or poor speech intelligibility on the basis of standard speech tests is based on measurement of only a fraction of the task of speech perception. This paper presents a descriptive comparison of information sources present in three widely used speech intelligibility tests and spontaneous, conversational speech elicited using a referential communication task. The aim of this comparison is to draw attention to the differences in not just the signals, but the tasks of listeners perceiving these different speech signals and to highlight the implications of these differences for the interpretation and generalizability of speech intelligibility test results.

Classification of 74 facial emoji's emotional states on the valence-arousal axes

Emojis are frequently used by people worldwide as a tool to express one's emotional states and have recently been considered for assessment in research. However, details regarding the ways in which they correspond to human emotional states remain unidentified. Thus, this study aimed to understand how emojis are classified on the valence and arousal axes and to examine the relationship between the former and human emotional states. In an online survey involving 1082 participants, a nine-point scale was employed to evaluate the valence and arousal levels of 74 facial emojis. Results from the cluster analysis revealed these emojis to be categorized into six different clusters on the two axes of valence and arousal. Further, the one-way analysis of variance indicated that these clusters have six valence and four arousal levels. From the results, each cluster was interpreted as (1) a strong negative sentiment, (2) a moderately negative sentiment, (3) a neutral sentiment with a negative bias, (4) a neutral sentiment with a positive bias, (5) a moderately positive sentiment, and (6) a strong positive sentiment. Therefore, facial emojis were found to comprehensively express the human emotional states.

Influence of Emojis on Online Trust Among College Students

Emojis are increasingly used in online communication and expression, however, most previous studies have focused on describing this phenomenon, but less on how it affects interpersonal trust relationships. Therefore, this study examines the effect of emojis on online interpersonal trust among college students through three experiments. A total of 62 college students were recruited for Experiment 1. The results demonstrated that positive emoji () improved the level of trust of trustors in the trust game [t(60) = –2.79, p = 0.007], whereas that of the control group exerted no effect on the initial level of online trust among college students. Then, 74 college students were selected for Experiment 2. The results indicated no significant differences between the experiment and control groups in terms of the influence of negative emojis () on initial online trust using. A joint analysis (via ANOVA) of Experiments 1 and 2 illustrated that the type of emoji exerted a significant effect [F(2,96) = 3.96, p = 0.02, η² = 0.08] on college students’ online trust. Finally, we recruited 111 participants for Experiment 3 to explore the role of emojis on online trust among acquaintances. The results suggested that the individual propensity to trust plays a moderate role in the relationship between emojis and online trust among acquaintances. That is, emojis influenced interpersonal trust among acquaintances only if the level of propensity to trust, is low.