Moderators of Language Effects in Advertising to Bilinguals: A Psycholinguistic Approach

This article examines a psycholinguistic model of bilingual concept organization and extends it to the processing of advertisements by bilingual consumers. The model suggests that second-language (L2) messages result in inferior memory as compared with first-language (L1) stimuli. These language asymmetries in memory are thought to occur because processing an L2 message at a conceptual level is less likely than processing an L1 message conceptually. Applying this notion to advertisements, this research examines picture-text congruity as a potential mod-erator of language effects in memory. The results suggest that a high level of congruity between picture and text facilitates conceptual processing of L2 mes-sages, increasing memory for second-language ads and thereby reducing the impact of language asymmetries on memory. This article explores how bilingual individuals processadvertising messages. Consumer researchers have de-voted relatively little attention to bilingual information pro-cessing and have instead focused on investigating how mon-olingual individuals process information (Usunier 1996).