The Prosody of Emojis
This research addresses the role of emojis in conveying prosodic intent in digitally mediated communication, offering insights for linguistics and human-computer interaction, but it is incremental as it builds on prior work by directly linking prosody and emoji with empirical data.
This study tackled the problem of how emojis influence prosodic features like pitch and timing in speech and how listeners interpret these cues to recover emoji meanings, finding that speakers adapt prosody based on emojis and listeners can often identify intended emojis from prosodic variation alone, with greater semantic differences leading to increased prosodic divergence.
Prosodic features such as pitch, timing, and intonation are central to spoken communication, conveying emotion, intent, and discourse structure. In text-based settings, where these cues are absent, emojis act as visual surrogates that add affective and pragmatic nuance. This study examines how emojis influence prosodic realisation in speech and how listeners interpret prosodic cues to recover emoji meanings. Unlike previous work, we directly link prosody and emoji by analysing actual human speech data, collected through structured but open-ended production and perception tasks. This provides empirical evidence of how emoji semantics shape spoken delivery and perception. Results show that speakers adapt their prosody based on emoji cues, listeners can often identify the intended emoji from prosodic variation alone, and greater semantic differences between emojis correspond to increased prosodic divergence. These findings suggest that emojis can act as meaningful carriers of prosodic intent, offering insight into their communicative role in digitally mediated contexts.