Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m8s7h Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-18T10:53:26.573Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Emoticons in informal text communication: a new window on bilingual alignment*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2017

LAURIE BETH FELDMAN ,
CECILIA R. ARAGON ,
NAN-CHEN CHEN  and
JUDITH F. KROLL
LAURIE BETH FELDMAN*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, The University at Albany SUNY, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT
CECILIA R. ARAGON
Affiliation:
Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington
NAN-CHEN CHEN
Affiliation:
Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington
JUDITH F. KROLL
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside
*
Address for correspondence: Laurie Feldman, Department of Psychology, SS 399, The University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY12222lfeldman@albany.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The study of emoticon use in text communication is in its early stages (Aragon, Feldman, Chen & Kroll, 2014), with even less known about how emoticons function in multilingual environments. We describe a preliminary longitudinal analysis of text communication in an online bilingual scientific work environment and demonstrate how patterns of emoticon use constitute a novel yet systematic nonverbal aspect of communication. Specifically, coordination over bilingual speakers entails reductions in emoticon diversity over time that are greater for those who communicate in their L2 than in their L1. An analogous but weaker pattern is evident for lexical diversity in L2 but not L1. We hypothesize that reductions in emoticon diversity in the L2 are likely to reflect social contributions to alignment rather than purely proficiency.

Keywords

alignmentbilingualismemoticonsgesturemultilingualism
Type
Research Note
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 209 - 218
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The writing of this paper was supported in part by NSF Grants BCS-1535124, OISE-0968369, and OISE-1545900 and NIH Grant HD082796 to J.F. Kroll and by NIH Grant HD01994 to Haskins Laboratories. We thank Kinsey Bice for her technical assistance.

References

Alibali, M. W., Kita, S., & Young, A. J. (2000). Gesture and the process of speech production: We think, therefore we gesture. Language and Cognitive Processes, 15, 593–613.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ameel, E., Storms, G., Malt, B. C., & Sloman, S. A. (2005). How bilinguals solve the naming problem. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 60–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aragon, C. R., Chen, N. C., Kroll, J. F., & Feldman, L. B. (2014). Emoticon and text production in first and second languages. In Kennedy, W., Agarwal, N. and Yang, S. (Eds.), Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction (SBP14). April 2 – 4, 2014, UCDC Center, Washington DC, USA. Springer, Switzerland.Google Scholar
Bazarova, N., & Yuan, Y. (2013). Expertise recognition and influence in intercultural groups: Differences between face-to-face and computer-mediated communication. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 18, 437–453.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bond, R. M., Fariss, C. J., Jones, J. J., Kramer, A. D., Marlow, C., Settle, J. E., & Fowler, J. H. (2012). A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization. Nature, 489, 295–298.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Branigan, H. P., Pickering, M. J., & Cleland, A. A. (2000). Syntactic co-ordination in dialogue. Cognition, 75, B13–B25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brooks, M., Kuksenok, K., Torkildson, M. K., Perry, D., Robinson, J. J., Scott, T. J., Anicello, … & Aragon, C. R. (2013). Statistical affect detection in collaborative chat. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2013), ACM (2013), 317–328.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chang, C. (2013). A novelty effect in phonetic drift of the native language. Journal of Phonetics, 41, 520–533.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge University Press Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Leeuw, E., Schmid, M., & Mennen, I. (2010). The effects of contact on native language pronunciation in an l2 migrant setting. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13 33–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C., Lee, L., Pang, B., & Kleinberg, J. (2012). Echoes of power: language effects and power differences in social interaction. Proceeding WWW’12 Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web. 699–708.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derks, D., Bos, A. E., & Von Grumbkow, J. (2008). Emoticons and online message interpretation. Social Science Computer Review, 26, 379–388.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dewaele, J. M., & Wei, L. (2012). Multilingualism, empathy and multicompetence. International Journal of Multilingualism, 9, 352–366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dussias, P. E., & Sagarra, N. (2007). The effect of exposure on syntactic parsing in Spanish–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 101–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eilola, T. M., Havelka, J., & Sharma, D.(2007). Emotional activation in the first and second language. Cognition and Emotion, 21,1064–1076.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, L., Aragon, C., Chen, N. C., & Kroll, J. (2017). Commentary on Goldin-Meadow & Brentari. Emoticons in text may function like gestures in spoken or signed communication. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, doi: 10.1017/S0140525X15002903 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feldman, L., Cho, K. W., Aragon, C., & Kroll, J. (2015). Interactions of emoticon valence and text processing. Noelle, D. C., Dale, R., Warlaumont, A. S., Yoshimi, J., Matlock, T., Jennings, C. D., & Maglio, P. P. (Eds.) (2015). Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. 23–25 July, Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Fricke, M., Kroll, J. F., & Dussias, P. E. (2016). Phonetic variation in bilingual speech: A lens for studying the production–comprehension link. Journal of Memory and Language, 89, 110–137.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Giles, H. (1973). Accent mobility: A model and some data. Anthropological linguistics, 15, 87–105.Google Scholar
Gill, A. J., French, R. M., Gergle, D., & Oberlander, J. (2008).The language of emotion in short blog texts. In Proceedings 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2008), ACM (2008), 299–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldin-Meadow, S., & Brentari, D. (2017). Gesture, sign and language: The coming of age of sign language and gesture studies. Brain and Behavioral Sciences. 39, 1–59.Google Scholar
Goldstone, R. L., & Lupyan, G. (2016). Discovering psychological principles by mining naturally occurring data sets. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8, 548–568.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gregory, S. W. Jr, & Webster, S. (1996). A nonverbal signal in voices of interview partners effectively predicts communication accommodation and social status perceptions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 123–136.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gregory, S. W. Jr, Dagan, K., & Webster, S. (1997). Evaluating the relation of vocal accommodation in conversation partners' fundamental frequencies to perceptions of communication quality. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 21, 23–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gullberg, M. (2006). Handling discourse: Gestures, reference tracking, and communication strategies in early l2. Language Learning, 56, 155 196.Google Scholar
Harris, C. L., Aycicegi, A., & Gleason, J. B. (2003). Taboo words and reprimands elicit greater autonomic reactivity in a first language than in a second language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 561–579.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartsuiker, R. J., Pickering, M. J., & Veltkamp, E. (2004). Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish/English bilinguals. Psychological Science, 15, 409–414.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hsu, T. C., Jacobs, A. M., & Conrad, M. (2015). Can Harry Potter still put a spell on us in a second language? An fMRI study on reading emotion-laden literature in late bilinguals. Cortex, 63,282–295.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kempe, D., Kleinberg, J. M., & Tardos, É. (2015). Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network. Theory of Computing, 11(4), 105–147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshall, J. (2011). The canonical smiley (and 1-line symbol) list. http://marshall.freeshell.org/smileys.html Google Scholar
Metaxas, P. T., & Mustafaraj, E. (2012). Social media and the elections. Science, 338, 472–473 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Min, C. S., & Schirmer, A. (2011). Perceiving verbal and vocal emotions in a second language. Cognition and Emotion, 25, 1376–1392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morone, F., & Makse, H. A. (2015). Influence maximization in complex networks through optimal percolation. Nature, 524, 65–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moscoso del Prado Martín, F. (2011). Causality, criticality, and reading words: Distinct sources of fractal scaling in behavioral sequences. Cognitive Science, 35, 785–837.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moscoso del Prado Martín, F. (2015). Measuring conversational alignment. Social, Emotional and Cognitive Bases of Communicatioin: New Analytic Approaches. AAAS 2015 Annual Meeting: Innovations, Information and Imaging. San Jose, CA. February 12–16.Google Scholar
Nicoladis, E., Pika, S., & Marentette, P. (2009). Do French–English bilingual children gesture more than monolingual children? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 38, 573–585.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Niederhoffer, K. G., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2002). Linguistic style matching in social interaction. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 21, 337–360.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pardo, J. S., Jay, I. C., Hoshino, R., Hasbun, S. M., Sowemimo-Coker, C., & Krauss, R. M. (2013). Influence of role-switching on phonetic convergence in conversation. Discourse Processes, 50, 276–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Park, J., Barash, V., Fink, C., & Cha, M. (2013). Emoticon style: Interpreting differences in emoticons across cultures. In Proceedings of the Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2013), 466–475.Google Scholar
Pavlenko, A. (2007). Emotions and multilingualism. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S. (2004). Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 169–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pika, S., Nicoladis, E., & Marentette, P. F. (2006). A cross-cultural study on the use of gestures: Evidence for cross-linguistic transfer? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9, 319–327.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pyers, J. E., & Emmorey, K. (2008). The face of bimodal bilingualism grammatical markers in American Sign Language are produced when bilinguals speak to English monolinguals. Psychological Science, 19, 531–535.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sagi, E., & Diermeier, D. (2017). Language use and coalition formation in multiparty negotiations. Cognitive Science, 41, 259–271.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schnoebelen, T. (2012). Do you smile with your nose? Stylistic variation in twitter emoticons, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 18, Article 14. Available at: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol18/iss2/14 Google Scholar
Shaikh, S., Lalingkar, P., Barach, E., & Feldman, L. B. (2017). Comparison of cross-cultural reactions to crisis events via language and emoticon use. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2017) CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaikh, S., Lalingkar, P., Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., & Feldman, L. B. (2017a). Analyzing Paralinguistic Cues in Written Communication using Information Theoretic Measures. Ms under review.Google Scholar
Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27, 379– 423 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shepard, C. A., Giles, H., & Le Poire, B. A. (2001). Communication accommodation theory. In Robinson, W. P. and Giles, H. (eds.) The New Handbook of Language and Social Psychology, 33–56.Google Scholar
Tagg, C., Lyons, A., Hu, R., & Rock, F. (2016). The ethics of digital ethnography in a team project. Working Papers in Translanguaging and Translation. (WP 12).Google Scholar
van der Pol, E., Gieske, S., & Fernández, R. (2016). Linguistic style accommodation in disagreements. Proceedings of the Fifth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2016), pages 120–124, Berlin, Germany, August 11–12, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vandergriff, I. (2014). A pragmatic investigation of emoticon use in nonnative/native speaker text chat. Language@Internet, 11 (4).Google Scholar
Walther, J. B., & D'Addario, K. P. (2001). The impacts of emoticons on message interpretation in computer-mediated communication. Social Science Computer Review, 19, 324–347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilkes-Gibbs, D., & Clark, H. H. (1992). Coordinating beliefs in conversation. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 183–194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yus, F. (2014). Not all emoticons are created equal. Linguagem em (Dis)curso, 14, 511–529. Epub September 00, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1590/1982-4017-140304-0414 CrossRefGoogle Scholar