Interference and integration effects on auditory and visual information: Differences between Chinese and English

Abstract

Written language is central to branding and marketing communications (Tavassoli & Han 2001) in modern society of consumerism, and the use of words and writing are key tenets in the development of brand identity for many products and services. Brand identity may consist of language components such as a brand name itself, brand slogans and verbal advertising messages. Majority of past advertising studies pertaining to memory have been conducted in an English-only context, implicitly assuming that advertising information is processed similarly across languages. However, while Chinese logographic characters represent meanings, English script contains symbols that represent sounds (Tavassoli & Han 2001), and such structural contrasts between Asian and Western languages have been shown in separate studies to differentially affect how information is processed (Gathercole and Baddeley 1993; Zhou & Marslen-Wilson 1999). Other factors that may potentially moderate the linguistic processing of a branding or advertising message also include the audio-visual representation of message and the interitem relevancy within a message. Hence, the present study seeks to improvise on past research and reexamine linguistic script differences and their effect on auditory and visual processing under relevant identifier conditions.With China being increasingly recognized as a global economic force, it is an observation that many companies are keen to conduct commerce in the Asian region. Knowledge about the discrepant impact of language on information-processing and memory representation is therefore of practical interest to businesses interested in successfully penetrating the Chinese consumer market through effective branding and cross-language communication strategies.