Emojis have existed for just over twenty years, but they began to spread in the form we know today and to become an integral part of conversations written via smartphone or computer only since 2011, when Apple first integrated them into the virtual keyboard of the operating system. of iPhones. Today, emojis have become a universal way to add nuances and feelings to written conversations that words and punctuation fail to deliver, partially bridging the gap between verbal and non-verbal communication. But what if their enormous popularity means that many children start using them even before learning to read and write.
Gretchen McCulloch, a linguistics expert, asked this about Wired, starting with a question posed on Twitter by Lulu Miller, a reporter for the US radio network NPR. Miller said he discovered that a 10-year-old girl from her neighborhood was exchanging messages with a 5-year-old girl, who could neither read nor write, using only emojis. He then asked if there was any research on the subject of any scholar, receiving the attention of McCulloch. Lacking any studies on the subject, she decided to start one with a survey in which she asked her Twitter followers if they knew of children who wrote using emojis in preschool, which emojis were used most and on what occasions they did.
While those babies' use of emojis may seem completely random, similar to the babbling, that is, the babble that babies make when they can't speak yet, the survey revealed a lot of interesting things. First of all, a difference was found between children under the age of three and those aged between three and five years: the latter were more prone to having favorite emojis (animals, unicorns, hearts ❤️ and poop are the most used). In addition, the survey noted that in many cases children used the keyboard in a rather mechanical way, for example by lining up emojis that were already close together on the keyboard.
A remarkable thing discovered by McCulloch's research is that, although children are so accustomed to using emojis, the meaning they give them is in some cases very different from that given by adults. There has already been linguistic research on the different interpretation of emojis between different cultures, but these had never concerned adults and children. For example, emojis that are usually used with ironic intentions by adults (such as the face crying with joy, the one that cries out loud or the one that reflects concentrated) are absent in the conversations of children, who instead prefer others whose meaning is more immediate. (like the one with the tongue out or the one giving a kiss). Furthermore, among children there are absent emojis representing hand gestures associated with actions or meanings unknown to them, such as the one with the thumb raised or the one with the hands in prayer.
The way emojis are used in messages also changes between adults and children. For the former they are in fact the complement of a sentence and are rarely more than three or five in a message: they are often inserted at the end, to reinforce a concept or to express a particular feeling that would be difficult to explain in words. From this point of view, children's “writing” is decidedly less sophisticated and structured: they use a large number of emojis in a single message, often repeating the same face three to twenty times in a row. This methodology is also maintained in six-year-old children, who have just learned to read and write, who, however, begin to add a few written words to the long lines of random smileys.
According to this survey, which is naturally coarse and of limited scientific value, what we are witnessing is a process of learning speech by children that has never been seen before. McCulloch's contention is that emojis could change the way children learn a language in the future. The emojis are in fact making sure that children are in contact with the written word as never before.
Until now, the written words children were exposed to were at most those printed on a cookie tin, a book read by a parent, or those from early school texts. However, it was and is rather unlikely that a parent would write something to a child who cannot read and write, but now it happens more and more often thanks to emojis. Children write messages and in turn receive replies, perhaps from an adult, both in the form of emoji and with meaningful words and, even if they do not know the meaning, they are thus, for McCulloch, active protagonists of a written comunication.
