Effect of native language on emoji interpretation
Affective and semantic affordances
Although emoji interpretation has been widely studied, there is less that has provided a systematic investigation of how affective and semantic interpretation may be influenced by native language of the receiver. That is, if emoji have key psycholinguistic functions, it makes sense that their interpretation will be bound by linguistic and cultural influences. We replicated the work of Scheffler and Nenchev (2024) in which we investigated how native language influences the affective and semantic interpretation of emoji. We focused on three different native languages; English, Bulgarian and Italian.
Affective dimensions
Various studies have applied the principles from affective science and social neuroscience to understand how emotional stimuli is perceived on dimensions such as valence (pleasantness), arousal and other affective dimensions. For emoji, there are many studies which have normative ratings for emoji sets on these sorts of dimensions, but are not always easily comparable across datasets. We focused on valence, arousal, clarity, familiarity and complexity, to understand whether affective perceptions varied across language groups. Our participants rated our set of 40 emoji for these five dimensions on a 9-point scale.
Semantic affordances
Alongside understanding differences between language groups in affective perceptions, where they may be differences, it is useful to know whether this is to do with semantic variance in the words receivers associate with emoji. We used free word association, whereby we asked participants to provide up to three words to describe the emoji in our set. We could then gauge the level of diversity in these semantic associations.