How quickly are face emojis integrated with their surrounding text? An eye-tracking study

Emojis are used in online communication to convey expression and emotion. This study investigated whether emoji integration occurs at an early stage of reading or at a late, more conscious stage. Participants' eye movements were monitored as they read informal, text-message-style sentences containing either a contextually congruent face emoji, a contextually incongruent face emoji, or a dash. Comprehension questions were included after each message to encourage reading for comprehension. Three early (skipping rate, first fixation duration, gaze duration) and three late (total reading time, regression in probability, trial dwell time) processing measures were analysed. Results revealed that compared with message-congruent emojis, incongruent emojis incurred significant processing costs on all late measures and one early measure (gaze duration). Further, both emoji conditions showed higher skipping rates and longer reading times relative to the dash trials across most measures, indicating emoji processing costs during both early and late stages of reading.