Positive Face Emojis in Sentence Reading: Parafoveal-on-Foveal Effects

Emojis are widely used in digital communication to convey emotional cues alongside text, yet their impact on word-level reading within sentence contexts remains unclear. We conducted an eye-tracking experiment to examine how positive (e.g., 🤩) versus neutral (e.g., 🧑🦳) face emojis embedded mid-sentence in otherwise neutral sentences affect the processing of the preceding and following words (e.g., positive “Did you change your hair 🤩 something is different” vs. neutral “Did you change your hair 🧑🦳 something is different”). We observed robust parafoveal-on-foveal (PoF) effects on the n–1 word, with longer fixations in first-fixation, gaze duration, and single-fixation measures when the parafoveal emoji was positive rather than neutral. This valence effect persisted even after accounting for mislocated fixations, suggesting that positive emotional content genuinely modulates foveal word processing. In contrast, the n+1 word showed no valence-based facilitation, implying that the influence of a positive mid-sentence emoji does not extend to subsequent words in continuous reading. At the sentence level, positive emojis were associated with faster overall reading times and higher valence ratings, although dashed (no-emoji) sentences in the pre-test were rated more positively than emojified versions in the experiment. These findings reinforce models of eye movement control that allow parallel processing of foveal and parafoveal information, highlighting how affective face emojis can shape real-time reading dynamics.