A strong wink between verbal and emoji-based irony: How the brain processes ironic emojis during language comprehension

TLDR

Emojis are ubiquitous ideograms, yet no study has examined how their semantic and pragmatic content is processed in real time, despite ERP research showing P600 effects to verbal irony. This study examined whether irony produced by emojis elicits neural responses similar to word-generated irony. Participants completed three experiments in which sentences ended with congruent, incongruent, or ironic wink emojis while neural activity was recorded. Across all experiments, ironic wink emojis produced P600 and P200 effects and late frontal positivities that correlated with participants’ perception of irony, demonstrating that emoji‑induced irony engages the same neural mechanisms as verbal irony.

Abstract

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.