The literature on face emojis raises the central question whether they should be treated as pictures or conventionalized signals. Our experiment addresses this question by investigating semantic differences in visually similar face emojis. We test a prediction following from a pictorial approach: small visual features of emojis that do not correspond to human facial features should be semantically less relevant than features that represent aspects of facial expressions. We compare emoji pairs with a visual difference that either does or does not correspond to a difference in a human facial expression according to an adaptation of the Facial Action Coding System. We created two contexts per pair, each fitted to correspond to a prominent meaning of one or the other emoji. Participants had to choose a suitable emoji for each context. The rate at which the context-matching emoji was chosen was significantly above chance for both types of emoji pairs and it did not differ significantly between them. Our results show that the small differences are meaningful in all pairs whether or not they correspond to human facial differences. This supports a lexicalist approach to emoji semantics, which treats face emojis as conventionalized signals rather than mere pictures of faces.

关于面部表情符号的文献提出了一个核心问题：它们是否应该被视为图片或传统信号。我们的实验通过研究视觉上相似的面部表情符号中的语义差异来解决这个问题。我们根据图片方法测试了一个预测：与人类面部特征不对应的表情符号的小视觉特征在语义上应该比代表面部表情方面的特征更不相关。根据面部动作编码系统的改编，我们将表情符号对与视觉差异进行比较，该差异与人类面部表情的差异相对应或不相对应。我们为每对创建了两个上下文，每个上下文都对应于一个或另一个表情符号的突出含义。参与者必须为每种情况选择合适的表情符号。选择上下文匹配表情符号的比率明显高于两种类型表情符号对的机会，并且它们之间没有显着差异。我们的结果表明，无论是否与人类面部差异相对应，所有配对中的微小差异都是有意义的。这支持表情符号语义的词汇主义方法，该方法将面部表情符号视为常规信号，而不仅仅是面部图片。