Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Emojis are pervasive in modern communication, highlighting the importance of understanding their influence on language processing. This study used two online primed LDT experiments to examine the lexical effects of emoji-conveyed valence and face status. In Experiment 1, neutral target words were primed by positive face and non-face emojis, compared to neutral control conditions. Experiment 2 involved neutral target words primed by negative face and non-face emojis relative to neutral controls. Experiment 1 revealed a main facilitatory priming effect in the positive condition, regardless of face status. In Experiment 2, no effects were significant. The results suggest that emoji-induced positivity bias occurs independently of the face or non-face status, reflecting emotional processing and interaction between lexical and affective processes rather than the semantic richness of emotional stimuli. These findings have practical implications for emoji-conveyed positivity in reading and stress the need to control emotional content in visual word recognition.