Research conducted by Lab Director Cecilia Aragon and HCDE PhD Student Nan-Chen Chen was recently presented in a talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose, California on Feb. 14th. Aragon presented their findings as part of a larger symposium on “Social, Emotional, and Cognitive Bases of Communication: New Analytic Approaches.” In the research Aragon and Chen analyzed chat logs from astrophysicists collaborating in the U.S. and France, finding that native French speakers in the scientific collaboration used more emoticons when they communicated in English. Their findings have implications for how bilinguals use emoticons to assist in communication when wording or phrasing might be challenging.
An article on the research was recently featured in UW Today: http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/02/13/aaas-talk-some-bilinguals-use-emoticons-more-when-chatting-in-non-native-language/
