Though an ever-increasing mode of communication, computer-mediated communication (CMC) faces challenges in its lack of paralinguistic cues, such as vocal tone and facial expression. Researchers suggest that emoticons fill the gap left by facial expression (Rezabek & Cochenour, 1998;Thompson & Foulger, 1996). The fMRI research of Yuasa, Saito, and Mukawa (2011b), in contrast, finds that viewing ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) emoticons (e.g., :), :( ) does not activate the same parts of the brain as does viewing facial expressions. In the current study, an online survey was conducted to investigate the effects of emoticons on perception of ambiguous sentences and users' beliefs about the effects of and reasons for emoticon use. In the second stage of the study, eleven undergraduate students participated in an experiment to reveal facial mimicry responses to both faces and emoticons. Overall, the students produced more smiling than frowning gestures. Emoticons were found to elicit facial mimicry to a somewhat lesser degree than photographs of faces, while male and female participants differed in response to both ASCII emoticons and distractor images (photos of non-human, non-facial subjects used to prevent participants from immediately grasping the specific goal of the study). This pilot study suggests that emoticons, though not analogous to faces, affect viewers in ways similar to facial expression whilst also triggering other unique effects.

Gender-focussed language reform movements are underpinned by not only gender but also language ideologies. This study explores the relationship between these ideologies across anti-sexist and anti-cis-sexist reform movements. The movements target differing outcomes and align with differing ideologies, but I argue that they share an underlying goal and underlying ideological tenets. While anti-sexist reform seeks to improve the status and render legible the experiences of a subordinate but legible identity, namely women, anti-cis-sexist reform aims to unsettle cis-sexist assumptions of gender and render greater gender diversity legible. In targeting these goals, anti-sexist reformers cluster around forms of linguistic relativity, while anti-cis-sexist reformers focus on linguistic performativity. Both ideological stances, however, share underlying conceptualizations of language as limiting and as acting in the world, while both goals share an underlying commitment to harm avoidance. This paper highlights the role of language ideologies, in addition to gender ideologies, in gender-focussed language reform.

The effects of emoticons in textual computer-mediated communication (CMC) remain relatively unexplored. CMC researchers have suggested that emoticons behave much as do facial expressions in face-to-face interaction (e.g. Danet, Ruedenberg-Wright, & Rosenbaum-Tamari, 1997; Rezabek & Cochenour, 1998; Thompson & Foulger, 1996). Some fMRI research suggests, however, that there is not a direct neural correspondence between emoticons and facial expressions, but that emoticons play an important role in determining the positive or negative valence of an utterance (Yuasa, Saito, & Mukawa, 2011). Following the affective priming paradigm developed by Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, and Kardes (1986), this study explores the priming effects of emoticons vis-à-vis photographs of facial expression and emotional words on valence judgements of emotionally charged words. Significant main effects of age, prime valence, and target valence were found. There were also significant interactions between these three factors. Overall results suggest that younger and older participants have differing experiences of emoticons, with younger participants experiencing an effect of emoticons that is similar to the effect of facial expressions while older adults seem to experience emoticons in ways more like textual information or even just textual nonsense.