The Role of Emoticons in the Comprehension of Emotional and Non-emotional Messages in Dyslexic Youth - A Preliminary Study.

Ewa Leśniak,Szczepan J Grzybowski

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.693287

Abstract

The study explored how well-dyslexic youth deals with written messages in an environment simulating popular social network communication system. The messaging systems, present more and more in pandemic and post-pandemic online world, are rich in nonverbal aspects of communicating, namely, the emoticons. The pertinent question was whether the presence of emoticons in written messages of emotional and non-emotional content changes the comprehension of the messages. Thirty-two pupils aged 11–15 took part in the study, 16 had a school-approved diagnosis of dyslexia and were included in the experimental group. Sixteen controls had no diagnosed disabilities. Both groups viewed short messages of four types (each including seven communicates): verbal-informative (without emoticons and emotional verbal content), verbal-emotive (without emoticons, with emotional verbal content), emoticon-informative (including emoticon-like small pictures, but without emotional content either verbal or nonverbal), and emoticon-emotive (with standard emoticons and including verbal-emotional content). The participants had to answer short questions after quick presentation of each message that tested their comprehension of the content. RTs and accuracy of the answers were analyzed. Students without dyslexia had shorter response times to the questions regarding all types of messages than the dyslexic participants. The answers of the experimental group to the questions about the emoticon-informative messages were less correct. The study pointed tentatively to the beneficial role of emoticons (especially the nonstandard, i.e., of non-emotional kind) in reading short messages with understanding.

Highlights

Of all the learning disabilities developmental dyslexia is the most common, with prevalence rate up to 17% of the population (Shaywitz, 1998) and many of the school children undiagnosed (Barbiero et al, 2012)
Since phonological processes closely relate to the act of hearing and speaking, the deficits can be especially pronounced in reading, which entails awareness that a written word’s units, i.e., letters represent the speech sounds and that they both relate to phonemes
The aim of the preliminary study was to explore whether the presence of two types of emoticons within emotional and non-emotional verbal messages helps with the comprehension of their contents in dyslexic youth

Summary

Introduction

Of all the learning disabilities developmental dyslexia is the most common, with prevalence rate up to 17% of the population (Shaywitz, 1998) and many of the school children undiagnosed (Barbiero et al, 2012) It is a source of potentially long-term behavioral, emotional, and psychosocial problems, especially in adolescents (Singer, 2005; Ingesson, 2007; Eissa, 2010). The phonological awareness is the best single predictor of successful reading (Brady and Shankweiler, 2013) Those phonological working memory deficits have been shown to adversely affect executive functions, such as inhibitory control and selective attention in school children (Barbosa et al, 2019). There is some data that developmental dyslexia could be related to more general problems in higher-order cognitive mechanisms like executive attention and multimodal working memory (Varvara et al, 2014)

Methods

Results

Conclusion