Bilingualism and the emotional intensity of advertising language

Abstract

This research contributes to the current understanding of language effects in ad-vertising by uncovering a previously ignored mechanism shaping consumer re-sponse to an increasingly globalized marketplace. We propose a language-specific episodic trace theory of language emotionality to explain how language influences the perceived emotionality of marketing communications. Five experiments with bilingual consumers show (1) that textual information (e.g., marketing slogans) expressed in consumers ’ native language tends to be perceived as more emotional than messages expressed in their second language, (2) that this effect is not uniquely due to the activation of stereotypes associated to specific languages or to a lack of comprehension, and (3) that the effect depends on the frequency with which words have been experienced in native- versus second-language contexts. English is the new lingua franca. From international busi-ness to the Internet and from science to music, English is the language of important aspects of the social life of consumers around the world (Cristal 1997). Indeed, it has become commonplace for commentators to identify the ris