A couple of months ago, NPR reporter Lulu Miller tweeted a question. She knew a 5-year-old who was texting exclusively in emoji, and wondered if were there any studies about kids, too young to read, who used emoji to communicate. People wouldn't stop tagging me in the thread, but we couldn't find any existing studies, so I decided to run a survey and make a small corpus of my own.

I wanted to find out not only whether kids were texting emoji but which emoji, and why? How do they organize emoji into sequences and ideas, and how do these early ramblings shift as kids learn to read? So I asked parents and other people with young children in their life to copy-paste in a few examples of their kids' electronic communication, with names and other identifying details removed. The results are charming and linguistically interesting.

Gretchen McCulloch is WIRED's Resident Linguist. She's the cocreator of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics, and her book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language is coming out in July 2019 from Penguin.

When kids use emoji it may seem random—a bunch of silly pictures on a screen. But kids start out learning spoken and signed languages in a similar way: by babbling nonsense syllables, which teaches them the rhythm of conversation and trains them to make fine articulatory movements. The silly strings of emoji that young kids send could serve a similar purpose. By exposing kids to the rhythm of electronic conversations, emoji may be a useful precursor to reading—a way of acclimating kids to the digital reality of using symbols to communicate with people they care about.

But let's start with the survey results. Yes, many preliterate kids send emoji-only text messages, and ages three to five seems to be the peak time for them. They're often quite elaborate. One 5-year-old favored "any animal that pinches," such as the following string:

🦂🐊🐍🐛🐝🦇🐜🕷🦈🦎🐟🐬🦀🦑🦖🦕🐋🐢🐌🐞🐚🦋🦗🕸🦂🕷🐛🐝🐞🦀🦗🐜

A 5-and-a-half-year-old's go-to emoji were "Animals, poo, unicorns, hearts.” A third kid of the same age was similar: "Unicorn. Poo. Lightning. Dinosaurs." Younger kids didn't have as clear preferences, but they were still emoji fans. Here's a string of animals and hearts from a three year old:

🦄🐴🦋🐛🐤🐦🐦🐧🐔🐣🐶🐱🐭🐰🐰🐰❄️❄️🌦🌈🔥💥☀️🍓🥞❣️💙💚💛🧡🔒💕💜🖤💞💞💗💖💘🕉💝☸️💟

These emoji texts are adorable, but as a linguist, I'm interested in what kids are trying to communicate. Many kids seem to be working their way through the emoji keyboard systematically. For example, several kids put the blue heart right before the green heart, which is also the order that they appear on in many emoji keyboard apps. However, kids are also willing to combine emoji from different sections, especially animals, foods, and hearts, which all appear in different screens of an emoji keyboard.

By exposing kids to the rhythm of electronic conversations, emoji may be a useful precursor to reading.

One thing is very clear: The kids don’t use emoji like adults or teens do. Overall, the most popular emoji are the face, hand, and heart emoji. While the kids use faces and hearts, hand shapes—like thumbs up 👍 and prayer hands 🙏—are not at all common for the younger set. Conversely, the kids use object emoji, like food and animals, far more than adults or teens do. Both kids and adults like happy faces, but their other face preferences are different: Kids don't use the faces that convey a note of irony, such as the otherwise-popular tears of joy 😂, loudly sobbing face 😭, or thinking face 🤔. Instead, kids prefer faces with the tongue stuck out 😛 or blowing a kiss 😗.

Kids also use emoji sequences differently. When mature emoji users use strings of emoji, they’re generally in groups of two to five, after a sequence of words, such as "I LITERALLY CAN'T HANDLE THIS 😂😂😂" or "omg i love you 💛💛". When adults or teens create extended emoji-only sequences, they typically impose some rules on themselves: Either they try to recount a story for someone else to guess—a kind of emoji charades—or they try to create something aesthetically pleasing, as emoji art.

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Emoji

The kids, on the other hand, are less structured: The emoji take the form of a drawing, or a selection of stickers. The kids also tended to send longer messages, and were more likely to send the same emoji three or five or 20 times in a row.

As the kids got older and learned how to read and write, their emoji messages grew more sophisticated. A six-year-old and a nearly-seven-year-old, both fluent readers, sent messages containing both semantically appropriate words and slightly less-random strings of emoji, such as: