Lies are typically defined as believed falsehoods asserted with the intention of deceiving the hearer. A particularly problematic case for this definition is that of false implicatures. These are prototypically cases where the proposition expressed by the speaker's utterance is true, yet an implicature conveyed by this proposition in context is false. However, implicature is a diverse category and whether a blanket statement such as “false implicatures are lies,” as some have argued can account for all of them is open (...) to investigation. We present an experimental investigation of whether naïve participants define different types of implicatures as lies. Our results show that only a couple of types of implicatures were strongly rated as lies by participants. These results suggest that participants distinguish between different types of communicated meanings on linguistic grounds, contributing both to the literature on lying, as well as to theoretical discussions of how different types of meaning are communicated. (shrink)

Emoji have been ubiquitous in communication for over a decade, yet how they derive meaning remains underexplored. Here, we examine an aspect fundamental to linguistic meaning‐making: the degree to which emoji have conventional lexicalized meanings and whether that conventionalization affects processing in real‐time. Experiment 1 establishes a range of meaning agreement levels across emoji within a population; Experiment 2 measures accuracy and response times to word‐emoji pairings in a match/mismatch task. In this experiment, we found that accuracy and response time (...) both correlated significantly with the level of population‐wide meaning agreement from Experiment 1, suggesting that lexical access of single emoji may be comparable to that of words, even out of context. This is consistent with theories of a multimodal lexicon that stores links between meaning, structure, and modality in long‐term memory. Altogether, these findings suggest that emoji can allow a range of entrenched, lexicalized representations. (shrink)