Psychotherapy, Antidepressants, and Combined Treatment for Depression: A Network Meta-Analysis on Social Functioning Outcomes.

Irony is a common form of figurative language, characterized by a contradiction between the literal meaning and the speaker's communicative intention. This indirect mode of communication often conveys humor, sarcasm, or criticism (Attardo ). Irony can be divided into positive irony and negative irony. The former involves saying something negative to express a positive evaluation or praise, making the intended meaning more concealed and harder for the listener to recognize. Such expressions are easily misinterpreted as impolite, and their comprehension requires shared knowledge and familiarity with the preceding context (situation). Negative irony, on the other hand, appears to be praise but actually conveys criticism, reflecting the speaker's negative emotions or disapproval (Harris and Pexman ). Compared to positive irony, negative irony is more conventional and frequently used, allowing listeners to more easily detect the semantic reversal between literal meaning and intended message by integrating linguistic and non‐linguistic cues (Ellis et al. ; Pexman and Olineck ). Irony is particularly demanding for L2 learners because they must move beyond the literal form of an utterance and integrate contextual, pragmatic, and socio‐cultural information. Existing accounts emphasize different parts of this process. From a pragmatic perspective, irony requires readers to detect a discrepancy between what is said and what is intended, increasing inferential load (Grice ). From a socio‐cultural perspective, learners' success also depends on how familiar they are with the situations, norms, and cueing practices that make irony appropriate in a given community (Ellis et al. ; Shively et al. ). These accounts jointly suggest that L2 irony comprehension is not only a matter of linguistic decoding but also a process of integrating literal meaning, contextual expectations, and social‐pragmatic cues. In computer‐mediated written communication, many facial, prosodic, and bodily cues are absent. Emojis may therefore serve as paralinguistic cues that help readers infer the sender's emotional stance and communicative intention (Boutet et al. ; Garcia et al. ). However, their effect is unlikely to be uniform. Hand et al. () showed that the interpretation of messages depends on the relation between text content and emoji type, suggesting that emoji‐context congruence is a key variable. In the present study, emoji presence refers to whether an emotional emoji accompanies the target utterance, whereas emoji‐context congruence refers to the degree to which the emoji's emotional valence is consistent with the emotional information implied by the situation. This distinction allows us to test whether emojis merely provide an additional cue or whether their fit with the context changes L2 irony processing. Recent cross‐cultural evidence further indicates that the facilitative effect of emojis on irony comprehension is culturally patterned: smiling emojis tend to aid irony comprehension in Eastern contexts, whereas winking emojis are more effective in Western contexts (Du ; Du et al. ). These findings suggest that emoji interpretation is not universal but is shaped by culturally grounded pragmatic conventions, underscoring the need to examine how Chinese EFL learners specifically deploy emoji cues during L2 irony resolution.