Investigating the effect of emoji position on eye movements and subjective evaluations on Chinese sarcasm comprehension
通过眼动实验，研究了笑脸表情符号的位置和语义如何影响中文在线交流中讽刺的理解和感知，发现评论末尾的表情符号能减少语义理解偏差。
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.