"Emojis" in Reading Texts for Beginners

[Christoph Päper]

Are in-line pictures in reading instruction books, standing in mostly for nouns, considered supporting proof of existing use of proposed symbols or emojis?

I recently realized, reading a children’s book to/with my sons, that a lot of the pictograms – I estimated 80% in my sample – could actually be represented reasonably well by existing emojis. Most of the ones that were missing were either very specific to the story (like the *�� ‘tower’ of a �� and the *�� ‘cannon ball’ attached to the ⛓ of a ��) or were closely related to the everyday life of a European toddler (e.g. a tricycle and a bike helmet). The glyphs are usually individual and specific to each book, especially if there are also full-page pictures in it, but I wouldn’t be the least surprised if a study found that the things – and it’s mostly things indeed – depicted in such books from different authors, publishers and languages came from a quite limited common vocabulary (for the most frequent parts at least). Different readings of the same pictogram, e.g ‘truck’ vs. ‘lorry’ for ��, are usually not a problem in this application.

Has such research been conducted and been presented to the UTC already?