Investigating the effect of emoji position on eye movements and subjective evaluations on Chinese sarcasm comprehension

Evidence indicated that emojis could influence sarcasm comprehension and sentence processing in English. However, the effect of emojis on Chinese sarcasm comprehension remains unclear. Therefore, this study investigated the impact of the smiley emoji position and semantics on eye movements and subjective assessments during Chinese online communication. Our results showed that the presence of a smiley emoji improved participants' interpretation and perception of sarcasm. We also found shorter dwell times on sarcastic words compared to literal words under the comment-final emoji condition. Additionally, we clarified the time course of emojified sentence processing during Chinese reading: the presence of emoji initially decreased first fixation durations compared to the absence of emoji and then the comment-final emoji shortened dwell times on sarcastic words compared to literal words in the critical area of interest. Our findings suggested that the comment-final emoji was the preferable choice for avoiding semantic comprehension bias in China. We studied how emoji position influenced Chinese semantic processing by combining the indices of eye movements and subjective assessments. Our results revealed that the comment-final smiley emoji was preferable for avoiding sarcasm comprehension bias. The corresponding time course and recommendations for improving Chinese online interpersonal interactions were discussed.