Editorial: Language and the digital frontier

Editorial on the Research Topic
Language and the digital frontier

We live in an era of unprecedented global connectedness. As such, it is more crucial than ever to understand how we process language(s) and how this is shaped by—and shapes—our use of technologies.

We have collated four manuscripts from seven authors across three continents, covering diverse aspects of digital communication, including: emoji, sarcasm comprehension, emotion processing, natural language processing algorithms, and universal language.

Two papers are related to emoji. Emoji have been shown to influence both the processing of the language that they are paired with and to shape the perceptions of communicators (e.g., Hand et al., 2022). In their paper “Sarcasm interpretation between younger and older adults”, Cui explores a question in an emerging area, pioneered by—among others—Garcia et al. (2022). Cui's experiments investigated younger and older adults' judgments in relation to ambiguous statements accompanied by a smiling emoji. Results showed that sender age and sender–receiver relationship influenced both younger and older adults' interpretation of stimuli. For younger adults, sender age and sender–receiver relationship were significantly associated with the perceived sarcasm of emoji-based ambiguous statements. For older adults, sender age had a null effect on the interpretation of emoji-based ambiguous statements, but sender-receiver relationship impacted interpretation.

Upadhyay et al. explored how face emoji impacted the interpretation of text messages. They conducted two experiments. They found that texts paired with positive emoji were rated more positively than texts paired with negative emoji (as Boutet et al., 2021; Hand et al., 2022; Neel et al., 2023). Furthermore, texts paired with stronger-valenced emoji were rated as less neutral compared to texts paired with milder-valenced emoji. Upadhyay et al.'s 2nd experiment demonstrated that slightly positive texts paired with strong positive emoji were rated somewhat similarly to the same texts paired with mild positive emoji; however, slightly negative texts paired with strong negative emoji were rated much more negatively than the same texts paired with mild negative emoji.

Yang and Zhou investigated the acceptance of the complete English translations of The Analects by investigating the number of online comments, downloads, academic citations, and other factors. Based on five natural language processing (NLP) algorithms (TF-IDF, Word2Vec, GloVe, BERT, and SimHash), 15 English versions of The Analects were taken as samples to calculate semantic similarity. It was found that the influence of Chinese annotation on the translation semantics was great. Furthermore, different translators' identities, the translation era, the translation purpose and the translation background were not significant.

Finally, Kramer presents an article which argues for an alternative approach to written language. In their Icono system, “words” are represented by strings of icons. Moreover, Icono reveals sentence structure graphically before, rather than linguistically after, one begins reading. Kramer argues that using simple pictures as words would helps those with diagnoses such as dyslexia, aphasia, cerebral palsy, and autism with speech impairment.

We hope that this Research Topic stimulates debate and inspires new research.

Author contributions

CH: Conceptualization, Project administration, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing. SR-C: Conceptualization, Project administration, Writing—review & editing. JI: Conceptualization, Project administration, Writing—review & editing.

Funding

The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

References

Boutet, I., LeBlanc, M., Chamberland, J. A., and Collin, C. A. (2021). Emojis influence emotional communication, social attributions, and information processing. Comp. Hum. Behav. 119, 106722. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2021.106722

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Garcia, C., Ṭurcan, A., Howman, H., and Filik, R. (2022). Emoji as a tool to aid the comprehension of written sarcasm: evidence from younger and older adults. Comp. Hum. Behav. 126, 106971. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2021.106971

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Hand, C. J., Burd, K., Oliver, A., and Robus, C. (2022). Interactions between text content and emoji types determine perceptions of both messages and senders. Comp. Hum. Behav. Rep. 8, 100242. doi: 10.1016/j.chbr.2022.100242

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Neel, L. A. G., McKechnie, J. G., Robus, C., and Hand, C. J. (2023). Emoji alter the perception of emotion in otherwise affectively neutral text messages. J. Nonverb. Behav. 47, 83–97. doi: 10.1007/s10919-022-00421-6

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