Language and advertising effectiveness: Mediating influences of comprehension and cognitive elaboration

Abstract Both memory for an advertisement and its impact on attitudes can be influenced by a number of linguistic factors, including the typeface in which the information is presented, familiarity with its semantic features, and syntactic complexity. In the case of bilinguals, more general differences may result from persons' facility with the language in which the information is conveyed. Many of these diverse effects seem likely to be mediated by the influence of linguistic variables both on the comprehension of the information and on the amount and type of cognitive elaboration of its implications. The present article presents a simplified conceptual framework within which these effects can be viewed. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.